UX research and content strategy

UX design updates for Agent for the Future

Project date:

August - December 2025

My role:

UX researcher, product owner

Background:

Agent for the Future is Liberty Mutual's thought leadership program for independent insurance agents. The Agent for the Future website features original research on industry trends, agent success stories, and articles from industry experts. The website has more than 90,000 users each year. The website was redesigned in late 2019, and had not had significant design or UX updates since. As the program’s content and scope expanded over the years, the website was no longer serving user needs.

Project description:

After internal interviews and discovery, I partnered with a colleague in UX research for a stretch assignment. I planned and conducted usability research while she advised on best practices.
Without the resources or budget for a complete overhaul of the site, I took a phased approach to updates. I started with the homepage, since that is the most-visited page on the site and often serves as users’ first impression of the website.

Project goals:

Understand users’ primary objectives when visiting the website.
Identify pain points and optimization opportunities for the homepage and site menu.

UX updates - homepage.pptx

Reflection:

What I learned:

This project gave me hands-on experience with UX research methods and showed me the importance of aligning content strategy with user needs.
I learned a lot about effectively interviewing users, keeping them on task, and asking follow-up questions to understand their experiences.
Users primarily use the homepage to find the newest content, and the existing design does not surface enough new content. This insight informed the UX design strategy as well as the content planning strategy.

What I would do differently next time:

Recruit more users for interviews. One did not show up, and one joined by phone, meaning I could not have her do the planned tasks, which required screensharing. I got what I needed for this round, but next time I will recruit a few more participants to account for no-shows.
Ensure user tasks are clear. In the first interview, the user did not understand what I was asking her to do. I rewrote the task prompts for the next interviews to clarify instructions.

Information architecture update for Agent for the Future (V2)

Project date:

September 2025 - present

My role:

UX researcher, content strategist, product owner

Background:

In 2023, I updated the website menu to organize content by topic rather than content format. However, additions to the website in 2024 complicated the site menu, confusing users. User interviews confirmed that users primarily looked for content by topic rather than format and that the menu needed to be simplified to make it more user friendly.

Project description and goals:

I conducted a card sort study to better understand users’ mental maps and inform site architecture. This research also helped inform content priorities and messaging strategies.
This research was done as part of a stretch assignment with a colleague in UX research. She acted as a mentor to advise me on best practices as I wrote the cards and questions. Since I do not have access to UX research tools in my role, she coded the card sort in User Zoom and gave me access to analyze the results.

UX content for new digital sales experience

Project date:

January - March 2025

My role:

Short-term (Q1) Innovation Experience Program rotator on the Small Commercial Digital Sales Team in Solaria Labs

Background:

Solaria's Small Commercial Digital Sales team is building a new digital direct sales channel, which will eventually allow small business owners to quote and bind insurance policies on the Liberty Mutual website.

Project description and goals:

Help outline and document UX content needs for the digital direct sales experience (planned to launch in Q4 of 2025).
Create a single source of truth for UX content that the team could continue to reference, update, and share with stakeholders as they build out the full quote flow.

My process:

Creating a UX content hub

After exploring options for documenting content, I decided to build a page within the Small Commercial Digital Sales team's Confluence Wiki to make it easy for the team to use and share with stakeholders. Since the team is still deciding the order and wording of the questions in the quote flow, I put each question into its own table including headings, question text, placeholder text, help text, etc. This will allow the team to easily move the questions and content around as needed and also allow stakeholders to add comments and notes on specific parts of the content.

Documenting content from existing experiences and competitor experiences

I talked with the product owner and stakeholders to identify the three biggest competitors in the small commercial insurance digital sales space, then documented the content used in their sales experiences. I also gathered content from other Liberty Mutual sales channels and added it into a column within the UX content hub page. This will allow the team to easily reference similar content as they decide the phrasing of questions and content in the flow.

Using LibertyGPT to update underwriting questions

The small commercial digital sales team plans to offer quotes for small businesses in more than 150 different underwriting categories, each with their own set of underwriting questions. These questions are currently written for an audience of insurance agents in Liberty Mutual's internal sales system. After documenting all the questions in another wiki page, I developed a prompt for LibertyGPT to rephrase the questions for an audience of small commercial business owners who would be going through the digital sales flow.

Interactive content campaign on agency perpetuation

Project date:

September - November 2023

My role:

Agent for the Future Content Lead

Project description and goals:

Plan a content marketing campaign to help insurance agents better understand the different paths for agency perpetuation and succession planning.
Create an interactive landing page that helps guide users to the most relevant resources or articles for them.

My process:

Researching agency perpetuation

I explored research from Liberty Mutual, the Big "I," and competitors to understand the different paths agency leaders can take to hand off their business when they retire and the challenges they face along the way.

Sourcing content

I planned a series of articles on different aspects of perpetuation planning, sourcing articles from industry experts as well as writing some of the content myself.

Outlining the next steps on each path

I wanted the landing page for the campaign to be more than just article links, so I created a mockup of a flowchart to help agency leaders find their next steps on their path toward perpetuation planning. As I built out the flowchart, I realized I needed more content for some of the paths, so I went back to step 2.

Overseeing the final product

I worked with our website vendor to create an interactive version of the flowchart, providing feedback in Figma before the page went live.

The original flowchart mockup I made in Canva

Perpetuation.mp4

The final version of the flowchart

One of the articles I wrote for the campaign

Information architecture update for Agent for the Future (V1)

Project date:

February - May 2023

My role:

Agent for the Future Content Lead

Background:

Agent for the Future is Liberty Mutual's thought leadership program for independent insurance agents. The Agent for the Future website features original research on industry trends, agent success stories, and articles from industry experts. The website has more than 90,000 users each year. As the program expanded over the years, the website structure didn't keep up with the content, making it difficult for users to navigate.

Project description:

My team didn't have the resources for a complete site redesign or for UX research, but we did have the resources to restructure the information architecture.

Agent for the Future Site IA 2 .pptx

My process:

Conducting a full content audit

I created a spreadsheet of every page and article on the website to determine how to group content. I used Google Analytics to look at pageviews and which pages and articles were getting the most organic traffic and which pages were getting the most traffic from the homepage.

Gathering feedback from stakeholders

I created a mockup of a top navigation bar and shared it with my team and stakeholders for feedback on the new structure, the order of topics, and the wording and order of menu items.

Creating new landing pages and launching

Once the new structure and menu were finalized, I worked with our website vendor to implement the changes, update content and URLs to fit the new structure, redirect old links, and create new page templates that I could use for content hubs.

What I would do differently given more resources:

Conduct user research and testing to test menu options and observe how users navigate the site.
Gather more data before the changes. Our website vendor implemented heatmapping after the new menu launched, and our website data moved from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 shortly after, both of which made it hard to compare website traffic and user behavior before and after the navigation changes.
Make the topline of dropdown menus not clickable. This was a compromise I had to make with our website vendor because of the structure of the pages in WordPress.

Page updated

Google Sites

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