Online Cancel
When Say Insurance was set to close down business and dissolve into its parent company, we expected many customers would want to cancel their policies and find another provider (without waiting out their whole term).
With no way for customers to cancel their policies online, I raced to design a flow that made sense for the circumstances.
This is the story of how I helped our call center avoid hundreds of cancellation phone calls.
Goals
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let customers cancel their policies online
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make it easy for customers to find the feature
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clearly communicate how much money the customer will be refunded
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have error prevention techniques to keep customers from accidentally cancelling
The policy page was where I chose to put the feature, since this is where customers make policy changes.
I chose to plug it in above everything else because of the special circumstances surrounding the company's closure. We also added it into the quick-link feature in case customers would look there.
Hierarchy of content on the cancel page was a key focus. I wanted to be clear that this action is immediate, as cancelling on a future date was out of scope for this project.
I also used similar design patterns from other pages on our site (e.g. Make a Payment) to communicate a refund amount and payment method. In this case, the refund amount and method are included on the same page rather than being split up.
I implemented a confirmation modal as an error prevention tactic to lower the potential for accidental cancellations. This aligns with Nielsen-Norman's user experience "error prevention" heuristic.
I anticipated another use case that wasn't in the original scope: customers who owed money rather than getting a refund.
After a meeting with the stakeholders, they decided that they wanted this feature to go out quickly, so a full-fledged payment-cancellation hybrid flow was out of scope.
I wrote copy to replace the usual script and directed these users to the payment flow before they could cancel online.
A confirmation screen was another important ingredient to communicate clearly with the customer. This acts as a "receipt" of sorts.
We also wanted copy that indicated changes might not appear right away, so that users would be less likely to worry if they don't notice differences immediately.
I also advocated for a session-specific message to change on the homepage immediately. This way, if a customer navigates to the home page they will see a change (since our system takes time to process a cancellation).
This was a good compromise between user needs and the time it would take to code a more complicated change.
Launching the Feature
I wrote stories for our developers to code this new feature, presented it to our stakeholders, and sent it off into the world.
I was very hands on in the testing process, getting to poke through every finished product before it was launched to customers. This quality control helped prevent any bugs that would need fixed later.
This project was a great exercise in designing well under an extreme deadline. I put this feature together in 2 days, sending it off to developers and receiving minimal changes thanks to detailed storywriting and thoughtful designing during the process.