back

Guevara

I was a co-founder of Guevara, a peer-to-peer car insurance company. Guevara was 2014's Wired Money Startup Stage winner. The same year, it was backed by Mosaic Ventures.

“Bad news for insurers may be good news for consumers. No grudges about that.”

"Hailed as peer to peer insurance, this purportedly revolutionary business model looks a lot like traditional mutual insurance. But it goes one step further by targeting peer networks: people recruit each other. The logic is persuasive. Members of a pool benefit by encouraging good behaviour and keeping claims (thus premiums) low” Lucy Colback — Financial Times

Responsible for brand and product, I rapidly iterated over landing pages, quote funnels, and policy management portals. As Guevara grew, I ran the (still relatively small) engineering and design team as a single cross-functional squad.

The Guevara UI design focused relentlessly on improving the tedious experience of buying and managing an insurance policy. From early on, we made the quoting, onboarding, and policy management experience a key point of difference for the brand. We also had a lot of complex and novel concepts to explain to customers, and we relied on the UI to let them explore how things worked.

Two Nap UI apps: pop, pop, pop; and push, push, push

I spent a lot of time trying to reduce the friction (and boredom) customers felt entering data, whether it was for a quote or to amend a policy. We used natural language forms, and a carefully reduced question set to speed up quoting:

Two Nap UI apps: pop, pop, pop; and push, push, push

And continued this experience into the policy management UI:

Two Nap UI apps: pop, pop, pop; and push, push, push

We designed, prototyped, tested, and built countless app views in the pursuit of a better user experience. Here's two years of Guevara app design condensed into about a minute: