Client
Achmea
Role
User Experience Designer
Industry
Finance · Insurance
Timeline
2022 - 2023 · 5 mos
Achmea is the largest insurer in the Netherlands. As the UX Designer, I delivered the final wireframes and information architecture. I helped guide visual design and development for early microsites, followed by joining the inception of the design system as 1st designer. A a result they claim and showcase social responsibility and unifying their diverse brand portfolio under one cohesive umbrella.
Launching award winning campaigns
At Achmea, an award winning film was produced for their new brand vision; ‘sustainable living together’, the Achmea way. A small group of stakeholders was invited to participate in workshops to understand, define and ideate on a suitable approach to align the digital strategy with Achmea’s mandate. Resulting in context-mapping and a conceptcar to showcase their commitment to 'sustainable living together' and the stories to prove it through brand-new microsites combined with marketing & advertising.
[image: wireframes]
Starting small and thinking big
Based on the gathered input in the workshops, I started experimenting through early sketches and wireframes. Firstly, sparring with my UX/Service Designer partner to bounce of ideas for the foundational set of components and patterns. Lo-fidelity sketches and wireframes were plotted on matrixes and combined in different variations to ‘taste how the could be combined. The initial iterations helped inform and inspire more high-fidelity work.
[image: early components + visual design]
Iterating on reusable components
In order to bridge the gap of the user experience and visual design, I wat with the brand designers to iterate on different ways of convergence towards a microsite that loads the brand and emotion but also has high usability standards. Followed by collaborating with developers to helped secure the pixel-perfect quality of and final touches on production. As a result we launched our microsite from a robust storybook library that invites continuous, sustainable development.
[image: late components + code in storybook]
Scaling the component library
After the release of the microsites, I was invited to set first things up for the inception of their brand-new design system as 1st designer. Synthesising both old and new work to shape a foundation that early product teams can utilise to help build new digital product that serves Achmea’s mandate. Under strict timelines, I analysed existing media libraries, converted assets, retouched icons, and published the first components libraries, which later grew out to become the design system.
[image: brad frost + shared figma library]
Defining first principles & standards
To communicate the design rationale behind the early Storybook and Figma libraries, I documented on different levels in Brad Frosts’s ‘atomic design model’. As a result, the categories became four living documents in which both designers and developers come together.
Learnings
What I’ve learned is the importance of working end-to-end. In order to bridge every step from strategy to launch, it is necessary you have cross-functional collaboration—people who blur the lines between disciplines.
Credits
Remy Lammers – Creative Director • Nadine Mosch – UX/Service Designer • Maxim Pashchenko – Brand Lead • Sjoerd Klatser – Brand Designer • Richard van Heuven van Staereling – Technical Director • Armin Mehinović – Senior Software Engineer • Jesse Nijman – Software Engineer • Robin van Gestel – Software Engineer.
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