Joel Wisneski | Portfolio

Nationwide

Redesigning an insurance mobile app for a modern audience

Project overview

Problem space

Nationwide's structure can be felt in its digital experiences. Different business units may have dramatically different flows and those systems don't talk to each other any more than the people who built them.

Team

I led the UX team and partnered with a Scrum Master to plan sprints, prioritize tasks and generate billing hours (we operated as internal consultants).

I was the only person on our UX team that was communicating with 7 separate development teams, the design leadership team and our business leaders (including the Chief Marketing Officer).

My role

I was an interaction designer at Nationwide but I also inherieted the Lead role. This meant doing the day-to-day IC work while managing output and handoffs for my Visual Designer, Copywriter and Front-End Developers.

Timeline

Ongoing for 12+ months

Deliverables

• Wireframes from Axure
• Information architecture diagrams
• Billable hours for the team (provided weekly)

7

Development teams

120+

Stakeholders

1.2 ★

App Store rating increase

An example of the mobile app's core navigation

This is how we modernized a legacy insurance mobile app.

We started with an incredibly open ended blue sky app design. Similar to some of the other products I've worked on, this vision was more or less a final view of what the UX team thought the app should be.

My job was to build the foundational design system and work with the engineering teams to get us to that vision.

The general process we followed getting the product to market

We started with an app built in the mid-2000's.

All of the information you might need was there but to do anything useful you'd have to dig two, three or four layers deep.

The initial Nationwide Mobile app screen

This is what the homescreen looked like before we started

Our Visual Designer created a new North Star.

Our Blue Sky design vision for the Nationwide App

And this is what our visual designer came up with

My job was to find patterns and work with 7 development teams.

I was in lockstep with our engineering teams, so much so that our design system became a library of shorthand symbols. This became essential near the end of the project. We were too busy and time was at a premium.

Modifiers and Overrides for the Nationwide Design System

Once I had the core patterns in place, we could layer in the branding and variants

I saved time by creating symbols and flows rather than screens.

Rather than creating distinct pages with placeholder data, I could have a conversation with the team and draw those symbols on a whiteboard. The engineers could start building the page and I could design it in parallel.