Prudential — Service Design
Prudential was the brief. The real ask was harder: make insurance feel human when people are already in crisis.
Client
Type
Year
The problem
Filing a disability claim means navigating legal language, submitting documentation, and making decisions — while you're grieving, recovering, or caring for someone. The existing Prudential claims experience was built for compliance, not for people. Forms asked for information at the wrong time. Status updates were vague. Customers called because they couldn't tell if they'd done everything right. The goal wasn't to redesign a form — it was to redesign the feeling of being handled by a system that doesn't see you.
How we worked
We ran 8 sprints over 24 weeks with design and dev working in parallel from day one — no handoff, no waiting. User testing happened at the end of every sprint, keeping everyone honest about what was actually landing. My motto: test often. We ran 15 one-hour moderated interviews every sprint — 50+ hours total across all claim types: birth of a child, illness, jury duty, military deployment, family care. We learned fast and revised faster.
36% preferred mobile · 36% preferred desktop · 73% said the flow took under 10 minutes · 45% wanted overlays with more detail
Product flows
Insurance is governed by legal constraints that vary state by state. We embedded business designers from Accenture/Fjord early — not at the end as a QA layer, but at the start, as design partners. That let us identify exactly what to ask, when — and what to never ask at all. The result: a flow that felt conversational without being imprecise, and legally sound without feeling like a deposition. Each claim type had a distinct path. We didn't force them into a single form; we designed the branching logic so customers only ever saw what was relevant to their situation.
The journey map
We mapped the full claims experience — from the moment someone discovers a benefit exists, through submission, through waiting, through returning to work. Every touchpoint. Every friction point. Every moment where the system failed people by treating them as a case number instead of a person going through something hard. The map became our shared language across design, legal, and operations — a single artifact that stopped every team from optimizing their own silo at the expense of the person in the middle.
What I learned
"This app looks clean and easy. It breaks down the necessary information. It makes me feel that my employer cares — it's what they call empathy for workers." — Dean, IT supervisor, Milwaukee
Dean said this in week 18. We printed it out and put it on the wall. Empathy isn't a design principle you add at the end. It's the constraint you design from the start — the one that makes everything else harder and better at the same time.