Nephila are one of the leading investment managers specialising in reinsurance risk, focusing on insurance-linked securities, catastrophe bonds, insurance swaps, and weather derivatives.
Web Farm Media helped Nephila deliver a large scale internal application.
Nephila selected Web Farm Media to deliver the user experience and front end development of their internal underwriting software.
Nephila's reinsurance division sources, analyses, prices, underwrites, executes and values reinsurance risk for Nephila and other pools of capital. Nephila were creating a new application to handle this reinsurance underwriting.
Web Farm Media focused on the design and front end development of the new user interface of the reinsurance underwriting application.
Having done a lot of work on complex user journeys and products, we found working within reinsurance added a whole new layer of complexity that we had to get to grips with in order to design a new user interface that would satisfy the users.
The size of the modelling data and the many possibilities that the system could output made this an extremely complex application.
We worked with Nephila's development and project team to deliver the project and advise them on the best practice for UX Design and Development.
Starting out, we reviewed the current state of the application, this included understanding the flow and how the system worked, not to mention the insurance terminology we had to understand.
When figuring out the blueprint for the new application, we needed to know what users wanted to do and what steps they needed to take within the application. User flows provided a guide, showing the interactions users should take from logging in to creating a quote.
It was quicker for Nephila's team to review and amend the structure of the key screens in a wireframe format. Iterating the development of the wireframes to a final version provided Nephila with confidence that the UI was catering for user needs whilst fulfilling the key business and project objectives.
Building interactive prototypes were helpful when we were trying to show an idea and explain design details to product owners and developers. This helped us work out the user pain points and improve the overall usability of the system.
After completion of the UX and UI development we created a UI component design library for Nephila, which was to be used for any new applications going forward.
Building the component library produced a single repository that consisted of all the styles and components used in the reinsurance underwriting application.
This included buttons, input fields, icons, text, components and colours. It also managed the source code for these UI elements.
By creating the library it helped the Nephila development team find the exact source they require for specific components.
All components are accessible by everyone so no prior knowledge is required to build new sections and pages.
It also gives developers and testers a visual respresentation of how the UI components should render in the browser.
Nephila's development team's job is to build applications that do not have inconsistent user interfaces.
To do that, it was critical to use reusable components that enforce user interface consistency.
Also the UI component library would provide browser compatibility across the applications within Nephila.