Designing a new policy inbox for artificial.io

Artificial makes complex insurance frictionless with powerful, automated products.

I joined Artificial late 2024. I lead a project to build a new ‘Policies Inbox’ on their ‘workbench’ product.

The workbench is where undewriters and brokers manage all their policies from inception to expiration. It helps brokers submit policies for underwriters to underwrite and bounce back.

Background

The main landing page was the Inbox. It was essentially a table list of all the policies, organised by when they last updated. However as the product grew, this caused a few problems:

• Several customers have described their pain when navigating inbox and accessing the information they need, especially when they have many policies loaded into their platform.
• High-value prospects raised issues about managing renewal policies in the inbox, blocking adoption
• Lots of customers managed their workflow with Tasks, which were located away from the Inbox and not linked - making it difficult to create flow
• Originally designed for smaller amounts of policies and throughput
• There were lots of broken features and bugs that were waiting to be addressed

The idea was to completely redesign the Inbox to help customers manage lots of different policies, with varying statues. It should help them understand priorities and what work they need to be done. Just like your email inbox - the Inbox should help you know what’s going on and what to do next.

What we built

The Inbox allows your to view all your policies in one convient place. You can also create custom views according to properties such as lifecycle, customer, date range and more. The Inbox is the central place that connects you to a policy, helping you plan your work and get the lay of the land.

Here are a few examples of what you can do:

• Create tasks for work that needs to be done such as chase up a client for sign-off on an upcoming renewal
• Look at high-risk policies in one list and triage them to the right team members
• Assign junior underwriters for data-entry on incoming policies
• Chase the progress of a quote from an underwriter

Views

At the top of the page, users can create and manage their custom views. Organisations can setup views for their underwriters and users can create their own just for themselves. Each view is a collection of filters and display options that are re-configured everytime they select the view. Everytime you select a view and return to the page, you’re back to the last one you were looking at.

Tasks

Each policy can have tasks associated with it. You can now view and create tasks directly from the Inbox, helping you manage your workload faster. Each policy has a small badge counting the non-completed tasks. Tapping on this opens up a sidebar that shows the relative tasks, allowing you manage and create them.

Instant loading

One of the coolest features saving whatever view the user was last on to our cache. That meant when users returned to the page, the results would load instantly. As users went cycled through their saved views, the results would display instantly and then call the API to get any updates.

This is important because users are often living in the workbench, completing thousands of small tasks every day. Each second they have to spend looking at a unnecessary loading spinner is wasted time that causes them to break their flow.