API Consumer System

Consume APIs

Company: Chubb
Industry: P&C Insurance
Location: USA

Chubb is the largest publicly traded property and casualty insurance company in the world. They offer insurance products to other companies and need to consolidate multiple platforms into one. This new multi-user platform will allow external consumers to connect to the Chubb API Hub and will also allow internal developers to design, test, and publish new APIs.

The problem

Chubb offers a wide variety of APIs, carefully organized into dozens of grandparent and parent categories. The problem is each of these APIs had to go through different systems for each stage of its lifecycle, from Design and Testing to Governance and Operations.

Due to the scale of their ecosystem, this decentralized process caused a lot of friction and bottlenecking.

Role and responsibilities

This project required a lot of structure. It was faced using a Human-Centered Design approach and an agile methodology. Some of the main things we worked on were:

Auditing the existing status and work done on the project.
Understand business goals and user needs.
Define priorities and main user flows to tackle.
Low fidelity wireframes
High fidelity mockups
Validation with client
Hand-off to development

In addition to these core responsibilities, I was mentoring a junior designer through the process with the idea that she would take over ownership of the project. Shout out to Valeria Ameca :)

Map the business products

Chubb has 23 grandparent insurance categories that needed to be mapped in order to create the best information architecture and discoverability of the parent products for the API Hub / Catalog.

Audit of existing API grandparent and parent categories

UNDERSTAND USER SEGMENTS

There are two main user segments this new platforms needed to serve: external and internal.

External users, or consumers, are B2B partners and brokers. We divided this segment into two main user archetypes: business representative and partner developer. Then we identified their main characteristics, needs, and frustrations.

User story mapping

Using this tool helped us visualize how the customer journey features fit together before jumping into the design. We mapped the main tasks and details that the user had to go through, from registering a consuming application to requesting access to a collection or product.

User journey map

The Product Owner provided an initial look at the highlevel end-user journey. What we then had to do was conduct user research to expand that journey and understand all the relevant touchpoints.

This was especially important because there are two main roles (business representative and partner developer) in the consumer portal. These roles have different tasks to perform and complete, changing how they interact with the platform.

First time external consumer flow. Representing the before registration, the onboarding experience and discoverability of offered products with multiple scenarios that touch both user roles.

Design system

While Chubb already had a design system in place, we expanded it with some patterns that were not accounted for such as iconography for each API grandparent category, collection card blueprint and component interactions.

High fidelity mockups

APIs Market Hub - Region filter feature

APIs Market Hub - Parent product documentation files

Settings - Team management section

External consumer happy path flow with final screens handed off to developers

Project Learnings
The methodology and PM

At the beginning of the project, there was no project manager (PM) which made collaboration difficult and made it harder to reach milestones.

Because of that, we integrated a PM into this project who helped us follow an agile approach. It was key for all team members to be aligned in which methodology was being followed so everyone could collaborate in a more efficient and productive way.