Eastwest ageas insurance
Designing for Scale: UX Across a Full Insurance Digital Transformation
In 2022, EastWest Ageas Insurance launched a company-wide digital transformation and I was brought in as one of the product designers to help make it happen. Over the course of a year, we redesigned three core platforms: a public-facing website, a sales portal for agents, and a customer portal for policyholders. The goal was straightforward but ambitious: replace a paper-heavy, fragmented experience with something unified, intuitive, and fully digital.
Timeline
Discovery through final designs across all three platforms, completed within one year (2022–2023).
Background
Each platform served a different user with different needs. The website needed to build trust and make policy exploration feel simple. The sales portal had to give agents the tools to sell and manage policies end-to-end without touching paper. And the customer portal needed to make after-sales tasks like renewals, claims, and policy changes feel manageable for everyday policyholders.
This wasn't a linear project. We were designing across three platforms simultaneously, working closely with product owners, business analysts, QAs, developers, and engineers at every stage.
Research & Planning
We started by mapping out who we were designing for and what was getting in their way. I joined user interviews with prospects, agents, and policyholders to understand how they navigated the existing system and where it broke down. From there we documented workflows, identified pain points, and defined requirements before touching any designs.
Design & Prototyping
I worked iteratively, building prototypes and bringing them back to the team and users for feedback. Insurance workflows are complex by nature, so a lot of the work was figuring out how to simplify without losing accuracy. Each round of feedback sharpened the designs.
Development & Implementation
Alongside the design work, I was instrumental in building a scalable design system in Figma to keep all three platforms consistent. Working in agile sprints meant design and development were running in parallel, so close collaboration with developers and QAs was constant rather than occasional.
Testing & Optimization
We ran end-to-end testing with QAs and gathered feedback from real users to catch issues before launch. Even post-launch, the work continued. We monitored usage and kept refining based on what we were seeing in the real world.
The solution wasn't one big design decision. It was a series of smaller ones that added up to something cohesive across all three platforms.
Agile & Workflow
Working in agile sprints gave the team room to move fast without losing alignment. Regular check-ins with stakeholders meant we caught misalignments early and kept the work moving in the right direction.
Design System & UX
The design system was the backbone of everything. Building it in Figma meant any designer on the team could work on any platform without breaking consistency. We validated decisions through user research so the system wasn't just visually consistent but also grounded in how people actually used the product.
Connected Experiences
The real win was making three separate platforms feel like one experience. Whether you were a prospect exploring policies, an agent closing a sale, or a policyholder managing a claim, the journey felt continuous and considered.
A year of work across three platforms, and the numbers tell the story.
Increased Efficiency
Application time dropped from 90 to 30 minutes, and policy issuance went from 3 days to 1. For agents and policyholders, that's a fundamentally different experience.
Design Consistency & Cost Savings
A more consistent design system meant fewer back-and-forth cycles during development, contributing to a 60% reduction in core system development costs.
Time-To-Market
New insurance products that used to take 4 months to launch were going out in 2. Faster design, faster build, faster growth.
Industry Recognition
The transformation reduced overall system costs by 65% and earned a finalist spot at the 2023 World's Digital Insurance Awards for Insurer Transformation.
Read the full story: Ageas 2023 Annual Report
