Designing a Senior-Focused Health Insurance Product
Mision
To co-create an innovative, user-validated insurance solution that balances customer needs with financial and legal feasibility, ensuring competitiveness and long-term engagement.
Vision
To design a health insurance product that offers real value to seniors, aligns with their actual needs, and supports long-term sustainability for the company.
Industry
Insurance
Size
Big Corporate
Markets
EU
Timeline
2 Months
Team Member
2 Designers
Type of Project
External Collaboration
Need For Cange
A shift was required from internally driven assumptions to customer-informed product design, with clear validation at each step. The company needed a process that integrated real consumer insight while keeping feasibility in check from day one.
Business Background
An insurance company sought to innovate by designing a health insurance product for a specific demographic: Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation. The business objective was to attract younger seniors earlier, increase product sales, and reduce long-term costs by having customers pay into the insurance longer before claiming benefits.
The Company
The client is a major player in the insurance sector, aiming to remain competitive by launching innovative products targeted at underserved or poorly understood segments.
Key Challenges
Misalignment between stakeholder assumptions and actual customer perceptions.
Difficulty in defining what "senior" meant to different target groups.
Ensuring product viability within strict legal and financial constraints.
Resistance to extra features perceived as unnecessary by customers.
Limited participation from legal and financial departments early in the process.
Objectives
Define insurance services valued by customers without compromising business viability.
Identify and prioritize customer pain points and needs in the senior segment.
Align stakeholder understanding with market reality and user feedback.
Develop a validated product concept supported by both user insights and internal feasibility checks.
Overcoming Obstacles
Perception gaps were bridged by showing real user data in workshops.
Feature overload was avoided by testing and simplifying based on user feedback.
Legal constraints were addressed by integrating feasibility reviews in the mid-stage.
Lessons Learned
Engage legal and financial teams early, not post-design.
Customers often don’t identify with traditional demographic labels. Language matters.
Simplicity and perceived value outweigh feature quantity in product design.
Impact
A co-created service aligned with customer expectations.
A more targeted and realistic understanding of the “senior” segment.
Clear prioritisation of product features and coverage levels.
Strengthened cross-functional collaboration and product viability.
Results
A clearly defined product concept that aligns with customer reality.
Defined customer personas and journeys.
Refined feature list, focused on what truly adds value.
A prioritisation matrix for future feature development.
Sucess Metrics
Alignment between customer expectations and internal stakeholders.
Successful user validation of the prototype.
Creation of a legally and financially feasible product concept.
Conclusion
This project successfully transformed assumptions into actionable insights, creating a product that reflects what customers truly value, and setting a foundation for scalable innovation in the insurance sector.
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