IAG insurance policy booklets (pds)

Insurance Australia Group, or IAG, is Australia’s largest general insurance group underwriting approximately $7.5 billion of premium per annum. In addition to redesigning IAG’s insurance contracts we also redeveloped their insurance policy booklets.

A lot of document design is based on the traditional book layout – a nice cover, followed by general contents, chapters, headings and body copy. This is great if your reading a novel but testing has shown us that most documents aren’t used in this way. In testing people said that they would only ever use the policy booklet as a quick reference guide, either at the point of taking out insurance or making a claim.

Based on this research we redesigned the booklet so that the main tasks that a customer would carry out in relation to insurance are listed on the main contents page. Task specific sub-contents pages are referenced from this page. From these the customer can swiftly move to a specific insurance topic. Each topic is divided up into three columns – a description of the topic, what IAG will do and under what conditions. This approach enabled us to reduce unnecessary repetition of insurance cover descriptions in the booklets, a source of complexity and confusion for customers in testing.

In testing our initial prototype was able to be used at a level of 43%. Our second prototype significantly improved the document’s performance, and was able to be used at a level of 93%.

Since implementation these booklets have been extremely well received by IAG’s customers, who, based on this design describe IAG as being open, honest and up-front.