Revolutionizing how independent insurance agents compare, quote and bind commercial policies
INSURTECH
Designed a B2B2C platform to streamline applications to carriers on behalf of small business owners—saving agents an average of 48 minutes per client
UX DESIGN I UX WRITING I RESEARCH I PROTOTYPING I USER TESTING I BRANDING
BACKGROUND
Purchasing commercial insurance is a complex, high-touch process that almost always requires an agent’s expertise. I know, I said insurance—but stay with me! The industry’s outdated status quo—a slow, error-prone system filled with endless print and PDF forms, faxes, emails, and redundant quote entry across clunky carrier web portals—creates confusion around carrier risk appetite and drives up the time spent per lead. The result? Higher costs, lower efficiency, and squeezed agent margins. Still with me?
At the time of this engagement, a few B2C SaaS tools helped small business owners purchase insurance, but there was no single platform that allowed agents to efficiently manage leads, quotes, and policies in one place. Meanwhile, small business commercial insurance was a $100B+ industry, with independent agents driving 90% of distribution—yet they lacked the tools to streamline their workflow.
Recognizing this opportunity, SEMSEE was incubated by D.E. Shaw (an investment and technology firm) and Nephila (a reinsurance company) to develop an MVP. The goal? To digitize and automate the end-to-end insurance application process, enabling independent agents to move seamlessly from lead to quote to bind. Revenue would come from subscriptions, carrier advertisements, and potential data monetization—creating a scalable, high-impact solution for the industry.
MY ROLE
I joined SEMSEE early in its journey, collaborating with the CEO on product roadmapping before leading the initial design of the platform. My role spanned concepting, sketching, wireframing, writing, prototyping, testing, and iterating to shape the user experience. After completing discovery and UX design, I partnered with a small agency to explore branding, logo, and visual design, then worked closely with the development team to build a functional prototype, gather and analyze user feedback, and determine next steps. Along the way, I helped vet and hire new team members, including a Director of Strategy & Business Analytics, a Head of Product, and freelance copywriters.
THE CHALLENGE
Despite strong funding and an experienced start-up leadership team, building the platform was a highly complex undertaking with several key dependencies: navigating an industry filled with regulatory requirements, securing carrier buy-in, and managing a data-heavy product with countless variations.
THE APPROACH
We set out to develop a proof of concept that would enable commercial insurance agents to streamline their workflow—managing small business leads, evaluating carrier risk appetite, submitting and tracking applications, generating bulk quotes, comparing and sharing offers, binding policies, and overseeing renewals—all on one platform. The portal would feature three distinct user views—one for agents to manage leads, quotes and policies, one for carriers to assess applications and provide offers, and one for business owners to review quotes and communicate with agents seamlessly. As more insurance providers adopted the platform, SEMSEE would evolve into a centralized data hub, enabling agents and carriers to cross-sell products, evaluate risk more effectively, tap into new markets, and expand their distribution networks.
INSURANCE VOCAB (You’re welcome!)
Broker : An individual who helps clients buy insurance , acting as an intermediary between clients and insurers, and is compensated by commission, a percentage of the policy sold.
Agency: A business that sells insurance policies to customers, which can be independent or captive to a single insurance provider.
Carrier: Another name for an insurance company. The terms insurer, carrier, and insurance company are generally interchangeable.
Wholesaler/Aggregator: This can be a group of independent agencies that band together to combine premiums, or a website/app that compares insurance prices for customers.
Quote: An estimate of what a policy will cost based on running a customer application through an algorithm calculating the cost of insurance.
Bind: When a policy is in effect, even if it is not completely finalized.
Commercial Insurance: Insurance that protects businesses from unexpected events, covering things like property damage, theft, accidents, lawsuits and more.
Market: A segment, geographic region, or distribution channel within the insurance industry.
AMS: Agency Management System, a software platform used by insurance agents to organize client data, manage policies, track sales, and streamline operations.
DISCOVERY
Field Research
As a B2B2C business, obtaining commercial insurance is a complex process with many players and a lot of regulatory lingo. While we were primarily designing for commercial insurance brokers, secondary users included small business owners and insurance carriers, who would require slightly different views of the interface. Throughout the research and design phases, we employed various means of collecting quantitative and qualitative data from users: we conducted ethnographic research and contextual inquiry and observation, observing brokers unprompted in their natural environment and asking them task-based questions directly: Which website and apps do you typically use in a day? What do you use to cross-reference info they need? What industry-specific portals do you reference? How often do you use wholesalers or aggregators? We also participated in agent simulation, obtaining carrier portal log-in accounts so that we could experience the painstaking process of applying for the same insurance in many different places. We also conducted interviews online and in person with brokers and carriers to understand pain points and desired features. Finally, I performed a lite competitive analysis to see how B2C tools in the space. performed
Form Review
Traditionally, insurance brokers must complete pages of forms, some in print, some online, in the process of applying for coverage. As part of our Discovery effort, we gathered, reviewed and mapped dozens of these forms with the intention of turning them into a single, dynamic interface with both required and dependent fields that a broker could complete one time and submit to multiple carriers, a change from the duplicative efforts in their current workflow. ACORD is the industry standard in the development of standardized forms. Below is an example of one of these forms as well as a spreadsheet created to assign fields to categories and sub-categories. Didn’t want to dismiss those who were not digitally-enabled—wanted to build it to be flexible enough to work with API-enabled carriers and not, providing digital capabilities for non-digital products. ACORD upload and download.
Feature Prioritization
The more we observed and spoke to brokers and dissected their form artifacts, the clearer their pain points and priorities became, leading us to a list of must-have features, which we evaluated by priority and feasibility, 1 (Highest) - 3 (Lowest). Below is a subset of the list:
* Filing a single or tweaked application to multiple carriers P1 / F1
* Data pre-population/autofill; business reputational data P1 / F1
* Quick quote estimates P2 / F3
* Connecting brokers with both appointed and new carriers to expand their profit potential P2 / F3
* A way to view application status P1 / F1
* A way to share application with small business owner for input P1 / F1
* Broker-business owner in-line application chat P1 / F1
* Ability to integrate other tools - email, calendar etc. P1 / P2
* Inclusion of unique supplemental questions per carrier P1 / F1
* Coverage comparison P1 / F1
USER + SYSTEM FLOWS
We drafted a flow to capture the real world exchange of information between brokers and small business owners, then diagrammed a more granular interaction to reflect data transfers among the two primary user types (brokers and businesses) and the platform itself.
UX SKETCHES
I began with casual sketching, then moved the ideas to the screen. One thing became clear : there would be many microstrates.
PROTOTYPE: BUILD + TEST
We wanted to test the interface early on, even if it did not yet possess the level of detail it would eventually. So we focused on the Dashboard, Application page, and New Application flow, and created tasks for a panel of 64 insurance professionals, then recorded their clickthroughs and collected their feedback.
KEY LEARNING: While both the Dashboard and Applications pages were well received, users wanted even more information and control, an Applications page that let them manage all business in a single place, a Dashboard with more detail but that was still easy to scan, and more personalization, auto-population, and integration with existing productivity tools.
UX DESIGN
With the agent view moving along, I turned my attention to the small business owner view, trying to make it as simple and conversational as possible to mimic the traditional insurance broker-business owner interaction.
LOGO + NAME EXPLORATION
We brainstormed names and taglines for the product, but ultimately landed on SEMSEE, inspired by the SEMCI principle, which stands for Single Entry Multiple Company Interface., since the platform's mission is to offer a unified access point to the small commercial insurance sector.
VISUAL DESIGN EXPLORATIONS
In tandem with exploring names for the platform, I worked with visual designers to create a design system, then extend it across the key pages.
LOGO DESIGN
We iterated on the logo quite a bit, but ended up landing on this treatment, which I adore for a few reasons: it’s a nod to the forms and fields brokers must complete when applying for insurance; its symmetry and white space suggest a simplification of the process; an abstraction of the light and dark fields echo the “s” in semsee. Brilliant!
LEARNINGS
Below are a few key insights that emerged from the initial platform design and launch:
* Forms should be as flexible as possible. Brokers and business owners should have the freedom to fill out only the sections they choose in any given session.
All fields in a active application should remain optional until submission is required.
* Add new features gradually. Ensure users understand existing platform functionality before introducing enhancements.
Given the build complexity of the platform, existing feature usage should be tracked and optimized prior to rolling out new ones.
* Tailor brand voice based on the audience for an interface: agents, carriers and business owners. Match language to familiarity with industry terms.
Adapt vocabulary and tone as needed to effectively engage all three user groups.
Today, Semsee saves agents an average of 48 minutes per client. SEMSEE continues to be a robust quoting platform that streamlines the small business insurance application process through smart forms, integrations, instant bulk quoting, and cross selling. Beyond that, they’ve leveraged their data to expand their offerings, connecting brokers and carriers through their Market Access Program, partnering with agencies to optimize their book of business through improved risk assessment, market analysis, and customized portals, and working with with carriers to provide insights that inform strategic decisions, pricing and distribution, ultimately increasing efficiency and profitability for all players.
The company currently connects to more than 5,000 agents across 40+ carriers in all 50 states. You can request a demo or read more about how they work at semsee.com.
SEMSEE TODAY
“By utilizing the Semsee platform, we are simplifying the process for quoting Arrowhead BOP policies, thus allowing agents to focus on the most important part of their job – advising customers.””