Creating value for all users

When she’s not busy helping Chubb create an incredible user experience, Krista spends her time designing T-shirts that she sells at marathons and other sporting events, with the proceeds going to charitable organizations. Her designs feature puns with a purpose—humor that is meant to draw attention to food insecurity, such as “Nacho average T-shirt, Let’s taco ‘bout it.”)

At Chubb, I am responsible for user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design. I do a lot of strategic work, establishing objectives and key results (OKRs) for the UX designers that work within small, functional teams. We look at what each team is trying to accomplish, and then relate that to the user experience. We try to see everything through the eyes of the user, first by doing our research to understand how the team’s objectives will be experienced and then engaging with users as we create live designs to test and validate before we move into development.

This is a new group, and a new way of working for me. Process engineers provide us with a detailed flow of what needs to be accomplished and we translate that into a user flow. We put together wireframes and then create mock-ups so we can test, screen by screen, what a user will engage with and experience. Then we review it with the business, and we tweak and iterate. Once the whole team feels good about the solution, we work with a developer to identify feasibility or mitigate any constraints to see where we can we potentially iterate a bit more before implementation. This is a level of collaboration I’ve never experienced before. In previous jobs, I never felt like I was getting the full context the way we do here with cross-functional teams.

We are working on a project now where we will be providing a better experience for a key step in the underwriting process. But, ultimately, what we as a company provide is insurance protection and service for our customers. That is a quality of life goal for our customers. I look for value in the way we impact all of our users—customers, brokers and colleagues – and this new platform demonstrates how the UX team can help to create value for everyone.

The thing that is most important for most UX professionals is executive buy-in. From the presence that UX professionals have throughout all the teams at Chubb, it's evident that we have value here. People really want us to be successful—especially our leadership team.