Designing for discovery — helping a new-age insurer grow with its membersClientHedvigIndustryInsuranceRange of WorkUX Research, UX Strategy, Concept Development, Interaction Design, PrototypingThe insurance industry has spent decades optimizing for the moment of sale and the moment of claim - leaving everything in between feeling transactional at best, invisible at worst. For younger audiences especially, the category rarely feels urgent: coverage is abstract, the need feels distant, and the motivation to engage is low. The rise of app-first insurers promised to change the dynamic, but many ended up replicating the same passivity in a shinier interface. The real opportunity wasn't just digitizing the purchase flow - it was figuring out how to help people understand what they actually need, and make acting on it feel natural rather than pressured. Challenge Hedvig is an insurance provider with a specific target in mind: the youth. A demographic that assumes insurance is something you buy when you're older - even though everyone needs it. And yet, the very audience Hedvig was built for couldn't easily buy from them. The app could do a lot of things, but selling wasn't one of them. Members who wanted to add coverage had to reach out through chat and wait for customer service to handle it manually. The result was two compounding problems: people couldn't see what coverage was available to them, and even if they knew they wanted it, the path to getting it ran through a human bottleneck.
This mattered more because Hedvig's product line was about to grow. At the time, the app offered home and accident insurance in Sweden - but with plans to expand the catalogue significantly, a chat-dependent process wasn't a long-term answer. So when they approached the batch of Design Lead at Hyper Island , the question became: how do you build an in-app experience that helps members understand what they have, discover what they're missing, and feel confident enough to act - for an audience that wasn't looking for insurance in the first place?Approach We opened with in-depth desktop research - mapping Hedvig's position within the broader insurance landscape, with a particular focus on providers targeting younger demographics. A competitive analysis helped us identify where the category was converging and where Hedvig had room to differentiate.
From there we moved into user research:
10 qualitative interviews gave us a nuanced read on how people think and feel about insurance - what motivates them to engage, what makes them disengage, and what a more trustworthy experience might actually look like.
A survey of 17 respondents helped us pressure-test those findings.
And 6 usability tests on the existing app revealed where the current experience was losing people - both functionally and emotionally.
Three distinct patterns emerged from the research - each representing a different relationship with insurance:
the one who knows they need it but keeps deferring,
the one actively trying to understand what they have, and
the one who only thinks about insurance when something goes wrong.
Each needed a different kind of experience.Strategy Seeing how everyone perceives and purchases insurance in fundamentally different ways, a one-size-fits-all experience was never going to move them. To upsell or cross-sell effectively, the product needed to meet each person where they were - and make the next step feel like a natural progression, not a sales pitch.
The needs of the three customer segments were translated into independent problem statements, allowing us to target each more precisely. These resolved into three clear strategic axes - reduce hassle, enable add-ons, make purchasing intuitive - which became the springboard for ideation.Outcome Five weeks of ideation and iteration produced ten concepts - each addressing the brief from a different angle. Together they turned a chat-dependent purchase process into a self-serve experience, helping members discover, understand, and act on coverage without needing a human intermediary. And helping Hedvig upsell and cross-sell in a way that felt intuitive to the customer base.