I'm currently a Product Design Intern for Summer 2024 at Milliman, an actuarial consulting firm. This is a complex space — designing tools that enable actuarial work, like risk modeling — but I'm having a blast improving the way actuaries do their day-to-day work.

Over the past 9 weeks, I've been working on 5+ projects for Milliman Integrate, an actuarial modeling software used by life insurance companies worldwide.

Although Milliman is a well-established consulting firm with locations worldwide, the product side is younger and growing! This provided an environment where I was able to work in a small design team and allowed for substantial ownership of projects. In addition, with no UX Researcher present, I took on opportunities to introduce UX research to the current product development process and train a non-researcher crowd on how to conduct effective research.

Actuaries need to regularly take a key task of overriding files in actuarial models. However, this process in Integrate is often manual, time-consuming, and prone to error, which compounds when dealing with sensitive and large amounts of data.

This was a BIG pain point for users and an existing issue heard from clients. It's at the point that Milliman consultants are doing the heavy lifting on this task for clients, nervous about letting clients do this on their own.

I redesigned this flow in Integrate to reduce clicks, time spent, and errors made.

Over the span of 4 weeks, I dived into talking with actuaries to understand their overall goals, key actions, and friction points with the current process. Through audits, a user journey, and Jobs-to-be-Done, I iterated on design solutions with frequent stakeholder feedback. Now, actuaries are able to conduct key actions faster, smarter, and more confidently.

Please come back to learn more about this project along with the design decisions made!

As a former researcher, I stretched my scope by spotting opportunities to build on internal and external feedback collection, closing the gap between the product team and users.

As Milliman has never had a UX Researcher before, I spotted areas where user feedback could help inform decision-making within the product development process. This was in-line with comments I heard from both internal actuaries and product players when I joined!

What did I introduce? An in-app feedback mechanism and an internal feedback channel!

Operationally, there was room to open opportunities for external AND internal feedback.

On the external customer front, I designed and pitched an in-app feedback form within the product, which would allow customers, especially smaller ones, to be able to be heard from. Of course, more feedback also means better products!

On the internal user front, I built out a Team feedback channel to facilitate feedback from internal actuaries who use the product on a day-to-day basis. This helps bolster trusting relationships between internal users and product players.

Please come back to learn more about this project along with the reception and impacts of this work.

Thanks for reading, check back soon for a full case study!