Seven insurance lines, one website: an implementation story
Able Insurance sells to two audiences who want opposite things. Here is how the information architecture resolved that without either side feeling like an afterthought.
By Shashi Kumar ·
Able Insurance sells seven distinct lines: auto, home, trucking, business, garage and two more besides. The brief sounded simple — "a website for the brokerage". The actual problem was not.
The real problem was two audiences, not seven products
An individual buying car insurance wants it over with. Three fields, a number, done. They are not interested and they will not read anything.
A commercial fleet operator wants detail. Coverage limits, exclusions, claims handling. They will read everything and they will notice what is missing.
Serve the first audience well and the second one does not trust you. Serve the second and the first one leaves. Most brokerage sites pick one and quietly lose the other.
What we did instead
Split the funnel, share the pipeline.
Each line of business got its own entry point and its own quote flow, tuned to its audience — short and blunt for personal lines, thorough for commercial. But every one of those flows terminates in the same structured submission.
That last part matters more than it sounds. The brokerage was previously receiving leads in whatever shape the form happened to produce, which meant a human re-keying them before anyone could act. One submission schema across seven flows meant leads arrived comparable, sortable and actionable on arrival.
Three decisions I would make again
Progressive disclosure over a long form. Nobody abandons a form because it is long. They abandon it because it looks long. Show one step, indicate progress, and the same number of fields feels like a fraction of the work.
Validation that corrects, not scolds. "Invalid input" is a dead end. "Postal codes look like A1A 1A1" is a fix. This is a trivial change that measurably moves completion.
A content model non-technical staff can edit. Insurance copy changes constantly — rates, coverage terms, regulatory language. If every edit requires a developer, the site is out of date within a quarter. This is the least glamorous decision in the project and the one with the longest-lasting effect.
What I got wrong the first time
I initially built one generic quote flow with conditional branches for each line. It was elegant, DRY, and completely wrong.
The branches diverged so much that the "shared" flow became a tangle of conditionals nobody could safely modify. Seven honest flows sharing a submission contract turned out to be far less code in practice than one clever flow trying to be all of them.
The general lesson: share the contract, not the implementation. I have now made that mistake enough times to recognise it early.
The measurable part
The thing worth optimising was never traffic. It was the ratio of people who start a quote to people who finish one. Every decision above was made against that single number, and it is the only number I would report to the client as a success metric.
Traffic is a vanity metric for a brokerage. Completed quotes pay the bills.
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