Heuristic Evaluation & Secondary Research Direct Auto Quoting Flow
Hoping to improve a subsidiary’s quoting process, Allstate needed a quick evaluation of Direct Auto’s existing flow to establish avenues of design improvements. Due to the time crunch, I decided to conduct a heuristic analysis, organizing and recruiting UX team members to evaluate the flow while supplementing findings with existing secondary research.
Methods
Heuristic Evaluation
3 UX designers and 2 UX researchers
6 heuristics selected from Jakob’s Ten Usability Heuristics (NNG), Jill Gerhardt-Powals’ heuristic set, and Weinschenk and Barker’s usability heuristics
Secondary Research
Allstate Online Services diary studies, interviews, and usability tests
National General / Direct Auto unmoderated surveys
Heuristic Selection & Collaborative Mural Board
The first step was to review and select six usability heuristics that would govern our evaluation from peer-reviewed sources.
Then, I set up a collaborative Mural workspace with an intro to the methodology and the entire quoting flow from beginning to end. Afterwards, we started identifying design and content elements that violated our heuristics and rated them on a severity scale.
Key Insights & Deliverable
In creating the deliverable, I decided to include an executive summary with prioritized recommendations. Violations were presented by severity in order of the selected heuristics followed by secondary findings from previous Allstate research projects.
Tabulated Results
Due to the longer length of the deck, I also compiled the list of heuristic violations in table PDF form to improve readability and make the findings easier to share.
Impact
Allstate designers reviewed our list of heuristic violations and targeted fixes that were high severity and easy to fix. With changes made, the product was moved into a series of moderated usability tests by other researchers in the department to identify usability errors with existing and new customers for additional iteration and improvement.