Turning a confusing health-insurance purchase into a self-service flow that works for first-time digital users on slow connections.
Tier 2/3 users in India are not edge cases. They're the majority of the next hundred million people coming online. But insurance flows are built for confident, high-bandwidth, English-first users. The result: people who needed coverage most abandoned the purchase, or depended entirely on an agent who may not have their interest at heart.
I led the redesign of the end-to-end purchase, partnered with research to get into the field with actual Tier 2/3 users, and made the call to rebuild around plain language and progressive disclosure rather than feature parity with the desktop flow.
We replaced the comparison table full of jargon with a guided conversation: a few questions in plain language, then a recommendation the user could actually understand. Every screen was designed to load and function on a weak connection. And we treated trust as a design material — clear pricing, no hidden steps, and obvious ways to get human help if needed.
Completion more than doubled, and most purchases now happen without an agent — which means lower cost to serve and, more importantly, users in control of their own coverage decision.
Inclusive design isn't charity, it's market access. The business case and the user case were the same case: make it usable for the people everyone else designed past, and you unlock the segment everyone else is fighting over. Getting leadership to see those as one argument was the win.