Dais Platform

Overview

Role: Head of User Experience Design
Timeline: 2017 - 2023
Team: Product, Engineering, Sales, Insurance Subject Matter Experts
Outcome: Flagship product that led to company acquisition by Origami Risk

Design files available upon request

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The Problem

Insurance submissions were stuck in the past. Agents and underwriters worked through fragmented systems:

• Email chains with dozens of participants trying to track submission status

• Fax machines still sending forms back and forth in 2017

• Duplicate data entry as carriers required similar information in slightly different formats

• Lost context when new team members joined a submission (no visibility into what already happened)

• Complex paper forms that required careful attention to conditional logic

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A typical submission involved 10+ people across multiple organizations, creating chaos. Agents needed to submit information to underwriters. Underwriters needed to request additional details, propose changes (endorsements), and collaborate internally. Everyone needed to stay synchronized, but the tools didn't exist.

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Why was this unsolved? Insurance carrier and bureau APIs were notoriously difficult to work with. Previous attempts to digitize this process failed because they couldn't handle the complexity of insurance forms or integrate with existing carrier systems.

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The Challenge

Design a submission management platform that:

• Brings agents, underwriters, and eventually policyholders into a shared workspace

• Works within existing email-based workflows (people won't abandon email overnight)

• Handles complex, conditional insurance forms accurately

• Accommodates infrequent users who might not touch the system for weeks

• Provides full context and collaboration for 10+ people working on a single submission

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Key constraint: This was a new concept with no existing solutions to reference. We were solving truly unsolved problems in the marketplace.

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My Role

• Led all UX research, information architecture, and product design

• Conducted multi-day user interviews and prototype evaluations with agents and underwriters

• Designed and iterated on key workflows and interface designs

• Worked closely with early adopters to refine the product

• Built the design system and maintained design quality through launch and iterations

• Collaborated with engineering to digitize complex insurance forms with conditional logic

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Research & Discovery

User Research:
Conducted extensive interviews with three user types:

• Insurance agents who needed to submit information to carriers

• Underwriters who reviewed submissions and made coverage decisions

• Policyholders who needed to provide information to get quotes

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We spent days shadowing users in their actual workflows, watching them manage email chains, fill out paper forms, and lose track of submission status.

Key Insights:

• Both agents and underwriters were deeply committed to email-based workflows

• Submissions often involved 10+ people, making context and timeline critical

• Underwriters accessed the system infrequently (only when new submissions arrived)

• Standard insurance forms existed, but every carrier added unique requirements

• Conditional form logic was essential—wrong answers could invalidate coverage

• Agents adopted new tools fastest, especially captive agents and specialty lines

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The Pivot:
Early user testing revealed that forcing users away from email would fail. Instead, we needed to design a system that worked within email workflows while offering compelling reasons to engage more deeply with the platform.

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Design Process

Information Architecture

The core challenge: create a shared workspace that made sense to both agents (submitting) and underwriters (reviewing).

Solution: Organize everything around submissions as the central object:

• Submission details and status

• Associated forms and documents

• Contextual communication timeline

• Endorsements and policy changes

• Full edit history and tracking

This structure gave all parties a single source of truth while maintaining their familiar mental models.

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Core Features

1. Submission Management

• Centralized submission workspace with all relevant data

• Status tracking visible to all parties

• Document management and version control

• Edit tracking to show who changed what and when

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2. Contextual Communication Timeline

• Better-than-email messaging within each submission

• Timeline showing messages + system events (status changes, document uploads, etc.)

• Full context for new team members joining mid-process

• Chat and comments to move quotes forward efficiently

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This solved the "10+ people" problem—anyone could jump in and understand what had already happened.

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3. Complex Form Digitization

• Digitized standard insurance forms with conditional logic

• Questions that appear/disappear based on previous answers

• Validation to prevent incorrect submissions

• Handled edge cases and complex dependencies

• Manual work to configure forms initially, but created reusable templates

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This was the technical breakthrough that ultimately led to acquisition.

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4. Email Integration

• Users could participate entirely through email if they wanted

• System sent email notifications for key events

• Responses to emails updated the system automatically

• Gradually introduced users to the platform's superior experience

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5. Policyholder Intake

• Simple, guided intake process for policyholders to provide required information

• Reduced back-and-forth between agents and customers

• Pre-filled common data to reduce duplicate entry

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Design System

Built a comprehensive design system that handled:

• Complex data tables for submissions and policies

• Form builders with conditional logic

• Timeline/activity feed patterns

• Status indicators and notifications

• Comment and chat interfaces

• Document management and uploads

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Key Design Decisions

Meeting Users Where They Are
Rather than forcing workflow changes, we designed email integration that let users work as they always had—then gradually showed them the benefits of deeper engagement. Users discovered on their own that logging into the platform was actually better than managing email threads.

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Contextual Communication Over Email Chains
Traditional email loses context and overwhelms participants. We created a timeline that combined messages with system events, giving everyone full visibility into submission history. When the 8th person joined a submission, they could understand everything that had happened without reading 200 emails.

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Progressive Complexity
For infrequent underwriter users, we kept the interface simple and task-focused. For frequent agent users, we provided power features and efficiency tools. The interface adapted to usage patterns.

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Form Logic as Infrastructure
Insurance forms are deceptively complex. We invested heavily in building form logic infrastructure that could handle dependencies, validation, and edge cases. This wasn't the flashiest design work, but it was critical to success—and ultimately what made us acquisition-worthy.

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Designing for the Chaos
Startups experiment. We tested CEO chatbots, blockchain integration, and book analysis features. Through it all, I focused on stripping away distractions to find the core value: helping agents and underwriters collaborate efficiently. Saying no to features was as important as designing the right ones.

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Outcomes

• Successfully launched with testing group of early adopters

• High adoption among captive agents and specialty lines

• Strong product-market fit in niche segments before broader expansion

• Company acquisition by Origami Risk in 2023, primarily due to the form digitization capabilities

• Product integration into Origami Risk's larger platform offering

• Email integration dramatically improved adoption based on testing group feedback

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Lessons Learned

Meet users where they are: We tried to replace email and failed. When we integrated with email instead, users adopted the platform naturally.

Context is everything: In multi-party workflows, showing "what happened" is as important as enabling "what happens next." The timeline feature solved the collaboration problem.

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Infrastructure matters: The unglamorous work of building flexible form logic was what made us acquisition-worthy. Great design isn't always visible to end users.

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Find the gold: Startups chase shiny objects. My job was to strip away distractions and focus on solving the core problem—even when it meant saying no to blockchain and chatbots.

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Design for infrequent use: Underwriters didn't need efficiency tools; they needed clarity. The interface had to work for someone logging in after a month away.

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Solve real problems first: We weren't the first to try digitizing insurance submissions. We succeeded because we tackled the hard technical problems (APIs, form logic) that others avoided, not just the UI layer.

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