Egypt microinsurance app
background
In Upper Egypt, the conditions for insurance products and their distribution are very different than what we’re used to seeing in a North American setting. The losses that Upper Egypt business owners are concerned about include expensive funerals, health conditions like cancer, or losses specific to small farms such as cattle loss or equipment damage. These business owners are typically not familiar with the insurance concept and don’t have expendable cash. As such, even if after learning about the benefits of insurance protection, committing to a year long policy is a very hard sell. Furthermore, the distribution of products and services typically happens through trusted community networks and face-to-face transactions. Self-service products don’t get as much traction.
In response to this, a company that the Lab worked with wanted to learn how they could manage and distribute a micro-insurance product: one that could be sold in small affordable units with short time commitments and distributed through an existing community of micro-financing brokers.
Who was involved
FairVentures Innovation Lab Team: Project Director, Product Manager, Design Lead (my role), and Product Designer Co-op, Technical Lead.
3rd Party Consultant: On-site research and requirements definition, concept testing, project management.
3rd Party Developer: Developer of the mobile micro-insurance app.
Micro-insurance provider in Egypt: product owner, Egypt micro-insurance subject matter expert.
Egypt Street Broker Network: stakeholder, partner, user test participants.
Problem
How might we enable a network of micro-finance brokers to sell insurance and collect premiums in small units across hundreds of clients in their local region?
Solution
The solution we created was a mobile android app to be used on most common phones found in Upper Egypt. UI design guidelines were kept close to Material Design to reduce communication overhead with the 3rd party developer.
Client manager (home)
List of clients with insurance premium dues
Add clients by capturing photo of government ID
Assign and modify micro-insurance “units” for each client
Premium Collection workflow
Managing a large client list without getting overwhelmed.
Collecting premiums directly on a daily basis - how do we make it quick and easy to make the premium collection.
Very simple workflow that can be initiated directly from the client manager (home)
Confirms the commissions made in each transaction for reward loop.
Insurance Products
View product details and educate the customer.
Add product to existing customer profile or create a new customer from the product screen.
Quickly add that type of insurance to a specific client when they’re educating a client on the impact of insurance through the products screens.
Insurance and claims stories.
Stories of claims submitted by Upper Egyptian clients that can be shared with other business owners to educate other business owners in the concept of micro-insurance and demonstrate value.
Left-to-right and Right-to-left (RTL)
Each screen has to be translated and transformed to RTL
Process
Working with a 3rd party to conduct initial information and formally propose the project
Most of the FairVentures product team was not involved in the original user research and requirements gathering process. This was primarily organized through the third party consultant. Most of this process consisted of meetings and interviews with the broker network reps and the product owner and Egypt micro-insurance subject matter. The primary takeaway from this activity was the nature of the micro-insurance products, the structure and practices of the broker network and small business owners in Upper Egypt.
Actor-task map to understand workflow
While the project proposal document created from the initial meeting was useful, the team members that were not present in Egypt had a difficult time understanding the expected scope of the proposed mobile app. To help define this we held a day long story mapping session to reveal what everyone was interpreting in the project scope, broker goals, broker context and worked with the project director to better understand what user tasks were most important to support. Subsequent interviews were conducted with the Product Owner and SMEs in Egypt to clarify any of the key assumptions and verify the scope of the prototype that we collectively defined.
Designing the Prototype
Once the key tasks were clear and we could visualize in what environment the street broker would be approaching the key tasks, we did an ideation session at the Lab and storyboarded a final concept workflow. Once we were in agreement about the key screens in the workflow we moved to digital prototyping in Figma, which allowed the co-op designer and myself to work collaboratively. We exported the image files to an interactive inVision prototype for testing in Egypt.
Translation and formatting
The design of the app was all well and good for english speakers, but most of the street brokers did not know english. To translate, we worked with a support to the Product Owner in Egypt to get translations for each language term in the app. This was managed in a word doc, but we quickly learned that neither Figma nor Sketch support right-to-left (RTL) languages. This resulted in the characters of the words being reversed after pasting. To fix this we used a excel macro to reverse the order of the letters in the translated words so when pasted in a non-RTL system that would have the appearance of being organized RTL. Noto font is the equivalent Roboto font that supports arabic characters.
Testing across distances and language:
Once the prototype concept was reviewed internally with the product owner we were ready to test, but only the consultant would be making direct contact with the street brokers in Egypt and they needed to learn how to conduct a prototype test interview. We suspected that a document outlining the methods and principles, such as how not to ask leading questions and following-up in interesting areas, wasn’t going to be effective. To help them learn the interviewing, we created a video series demonstrating the interview script acted out between members at the lab. The consultants and their translators watched the video before testing and expressed to us afterward that it helped dramatically in quickly learning how to conduct prototype test interviews.
Interpreting the test results
We also recognized that interpreting the feedback from the interviews (especially non-verbal), was going to be critical for us to write our recommendations for the next phase of the project, so we had the consultants also record the interviews. When the videos of the interviews were made available, we worked with a local interpreter, who provided direct translations of the interviews. He would do this by playing the video, then pausing every 30 seconds and giving his rough translation of what was being said along with the interpreted sentiment. This gave us critical insight into the reception of the prototype - which was fairly surprising. See the next section for our hypotheses and results.
Hypotheses and test results
Micro-finance brokers would be interested and able to adopt the mobile app as a way to take small payments and selling micro-insurance policies.
False. Street guardians didn’t have consistent experience and understanding of smartphones. Their knowledge of insurance was also very limited. One of the testers refused to even pick-up the test Samsung smartphone during the interview explaining they didn’t understand or use. Most test workflows could not be completed by the tester.
Micro-finance brokers would understand insurance, how they could make money with insurance and how they could support their community selling insurance.
False. Street guardians were not able to understand the concept of insurance through the app. It was difficult to explain the concept.
Outcomes of the project
Refocused on a solution to educate the street brokers
Through testing it was discovered that reception of the app as designed was too much of a leap for the street guardians that we tested with. As a result is was decided that at the next phase of the project would focus on an education solution that would help the broker network understand the concept of micro-insurance, the different kinds of coverages available, and the mechanics of adding clients and collecting premiums. The initial micro-insurance solution would be paper-based.
App was created by student based on the design specification
It was expected that through training and using the paper-based system, that street brokers would get better at handling the insurance and would be more receptive to a more efficient digital based system, especially if the their regional co-ordinator would be supplying the smartphones. With that in mind, development of the app was completed through a 3rd party contract as way to begin connecting the NGO and Egypt insurance providers IT systems so that it was ready for that transition.
Beginning the process with paper-based policies
As of January 2019 thousands of policies have been sold and many micro-finance brokers have been trained on the paper-based system. And animated video was created to explain the micro-insurance concept and products to street guardians. The next phase of the project will be to roll out the digital solution proposed by the Lab.