Motor Ichiban

Improving the online presence of a product for a specific user group

The Motor Ichiban car insurance brand was created specifically for Japanese expats living in the UK. After its acquisition by MS&AD Insurance Group in 2017 I was part of the team responsible for improving and increasing its digital offerings.

Role

Product Designer

Team

1 Product Owner
1 Product Designer
1 UI Designer
3 Developers

Duration

December 2017 to May 2018 (6 months)

Tools

Sketch
Axure
Zeplin
HTML/CSS

Key challenges

Selling the value of design thinking internally to the business
Understanding design and digital behaviour of a different culture
Leading the creative direction and production of UI assets

Go to website

Getting to know our users

Motor Ichiban was created over 20 years ago as a car insurance product specifically for Japanese expats living in the UK. These expats had a generally low level of English and were used to a Japanese level of service. Our first task was to understand these users and their behaviours.

With limited time we decided to create proto-personas with the aid of various stakeholders, including the original founder of Motor Ichiban who know most of the customers individually. This proved both advantageous and limiting as there were many assumed behaviours that proved to be inaccurate after more detailed research.

These proto-personas would be refined as we learnt more about our users. They can be found here.

Getting to know the product

By speaking to staff we put together a service blueprint for the current process and identified the key areas for improvement, both internally and for the users. The full size version can be found here.

We also carried out a thorough competitor and threat analysis to better understand where Motor Ichiban currently sat in the market. Combined with what we knew about our user needs this helped us accurately define the value proposition for the Motor Ichiban product:

Motor Ichiban provides motor insurance in Japanese language with a high level of service expected by Japanese customers, in the UK.

A study of Japanese digital behaviour

One of the biggest challenges was understanding the differences in the psychology and behaviours of Japanese users. It was apparent that Japanese web design and usability was vastly different from western standards.

As part of our research and internal pitch to stake holders we put together a deck outlining our findings. This helped increase resourcing and extend deadlines on the project as well as showing other parts of the business the importance of thorough UX research. The full deck can be found here.

Positioning the brand

In order to establish a suitable design direction we wanted to define the current and desired personality and values of the Motor Ichiban brand with key stakeholders. From this 5 key attributes were defined that would inform all UX and UI design decisions moving forward.

Once completed these attributes were printed out with descriptions and stuck around the office as a permanent reminder of the brand values we were trying the convey in our product.

The attributes were:
Home Abroad, Quality, Clear, Supportive, Informed.

Layout and wire-framing

We sat down with the development from the beginning of the design process to establish a universal responsive grid system and working process.

Working with a mobile-first approach we produced wireframes for the four main pages we had agreed upon for phase one. Due to the detailed research and consensus across the business much of the core information architecture and page structure remained unchanged until release.

In order to aid the development team prototypes were also produced to communicate simple navigation and interaction styles. An example of this can be found here.

Developing the visual style

Having defined the brand personality the UI Designer and I worked on constructing a cohesive UI that worked across all breakpoints. We wanted to incorporate the personable feel of Motor Ichiban with the professionalism of parent company MS&AD whilst bringing everything up to date and following UI best practice.

During this process we held regular review sessions with a small selection of Japanese expats to evaluate both the usability and look-and-feel of our designs. Often the styles and imagery preferred by the user base were noticeably different from those chosen by members of the design team.

Understanding and developing typography rules in two languages was challenging but something I thoroughly enjoyed and would like to explore in more detail.

Completion and release

After around 5 months the design work for phase one was complete. Unfortunately after I left the team MS&AD de-prioritised the project and the development work was left half-finished. However in February 2020 the new website was made live, around 2 years later.

There are still many improvements that need to be made to the design but I believe a lot was achieved in the short period of time we had.

The live site can be found here.