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Santander México · via PALO IT · 2018-20 · Case study

Making car insurance easy to compare and buy

Three years with the Autocompara team, redesigning Santander's car insurance comparison site from the journey to the copy. Digital sales more than doubled.

Role
UX/UI Consultant (Product Designer)
Team
An agile team with a Product Owner, an agile coach, two QAs, two to three frontend and three to four backend engineers, and me as the designer
Timeline
2018-20 · 3+ years
Practice
ResearchWorkshopsDesign systems
2×+digital sales vs. the year before our team started · Sales figures hidden for confidentiality
Redesigned Autocompara.com on a tablet

Context

Autocompara is Santander México’s car insurance comparison site, where you can compare and buy a policy from the main insurers in the country (AXA, GNP, Qualitas, Zurich, Mapfre and more). When we arrived, sales had been flat for four years and new comparison sites were showing up, so Santander asked PALO IT for help. I ended up working with the Autocompara team for more than three years, and without a doubt it’s one of the products I love the most.

The original Autocompara site before the redesign
Where we started.

Understanding the journey

We started by listening. In workshops with the people who talk to customers every day, we mapped the whole journey: every touchpoint, how people felt, where they got stuck and what made them happy.

Customer journey map from the workshops: stages, emotions, pain and happy points
The customer journey map we built together in the workshops.

Then we added the tools to see what was really happening: Hotjar and Google Analytics to understand behavior in the funnel, and one-click satisfaction surveys by email so customers could tell us more in their own words.

Hotjar set up to measure the funnel and collect feedback

What we changed

A faster flow. Better technology, lighter images and fewer steps took the time to get a quote from 36 to 28 seconds.

Quote results before and after the redesign
Quote results, 2018 vs. 2019.

A new brand and a new design system. Autocompara was the first Santander product to launch the 2018 brand identity. We used the moment to improve contrast, readability and the feedback people get while filling a form.

Payment step before and after the new brand and design system
Payment step, before and after the new brand.
Autocompara mobile flow: vehicle details, quote comparison and secure payment
The new mobile flow: tell us about your car, compare and choose, pay safely.

Shorter forms. We renamed confusing fields, added helpful tooltips, used APIs to fill some inputs automatically and rebuilt the car model search, which also remembers your last searches.

Shorter vehicle form with model search

The secret sauce: the words. This was a huge amount of work. Every insurer hides the important details of a policy inside long legal documents, so we went through the terms and conditions of each company, one by one, and rewrote what really matters in plain, human language. If you can’t see those details, you can’t really compare.

Redesigned coverage detail with plain-language explanations
Coverages explained in plain language, so people can compare for real.

Results

Conversion
1.8%2.4%
Our team starts
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
Digital sales by year. Figures hidden for confidentiality.

Sales had barely moved for years. From 2018, when our team started, they grew every year, and by 2020 digital sales were more than double the year before we arrived. Autocompara also became the favorite tool of branch advisors, and in 2020 the bank asked our team to take care of all of Santander’s other digital insurance products.

Recognition

Laurels for Best Palowan 2018 and Best PALO IT México Project 2019
  • Best PALO IT México Project, 2019, for Autocompara.
  • Best Palowan (employee of the year at PALO IT), 2018.

I’m still very proud of what this team built.