How We Make

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User Experience (UX) design has traditionally been overlooked within insurance distribution management platforms. Investing in UX for this space is an ambitious endeavor that requires a deep understanding of intricate insurance workflows to create both beautiful and functional interfaces. Many existing solutions are outdated, often decades old, and lack the purpose-built architecture necessary to drive real business value for carriers and distributors.

Too often, software vendors focus on ‘checking boxes’ in response to RFPs, delivering features that are incomplete or too rigid to meet the evolving needs of clients. These limitations frequently emerge during lengthy, costly implementation projects, resulting in widespread tales of failed launches, false starts, and dissatisfied client teams.

Chestnut brings a fundamental shift by making great UX design a core pillar of our product development. We call this our Maker Process—and at Chestnut, we’re all makers.

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Redefining Design Challenges with a Maker Culture

To cultivate a strong, industry-specific maker culture, we reframed key challenges that product and design teams typically face. Here’s how we approached the design for Chestnut’s Producer Performance Management (PPM) system to ensure it aligns with our commitment to flexibility, usability, and user success.

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1. Investing Heavily in a Flexible Design System

A design system is a set of building blocks and rules that define how a product looks and feels. Design systems must remain relevant and adaptable to continue adding value. If left unmaintained, a design system quickly loses its effectiveness, creating a feedback loop where it becomes more outdated and harder to use over time. For Chestnut, creating a design system wasn’t a one-time project but an ongoing commitment to adaptability and innovation.

We carefully considered when to reuse design elements and when to build something new to preserve quality and speed. This approach ensures we can meet a variety of needs, balancing consistency with customization for insurance-specific workflows.

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2. Embracing Quality and Speed as Complementary, Not Opposed

A common challenge in software design is balancing quality with speed, but at Chestnut, we view them as complementary goals. Our PPM system is built for maximum flexibility and configurability, which enables rapid iteration without sacrificing quality.

By designing the system with adaptable, modular components, we maintain high standards while swiftly responding to user feedback and industry changes. This agility keeps our product both high-performing and immediately relevant.

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3. Making Production the Source of Truth, Not Figma

Product design is only valuable if it reaches the end user in its intended form. While tools like Figma are essential for prototyping and collaboration, we believe the true test of a design is its impact in a live environment. Our design team collaborates closely with engineers to bring concepts into production swiftly, ensuring that what we envision on the screen becomes tangible for our users. In this way, we treat production as the real source of truth, prioritizing practical implementation over theoretical perfection.

Quality of the end experience is paramount. That’s why rigorous testing and evaluation through UAT is the foundation for our release process.

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4. Listening Closely to Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)

Our commitment to delivering value to customers requires us to involve them deeply in our maker process. Working with enterprise customers grants us the privilege of collaborating with highly knowledgeable and motivated individuals who contribute to our design process as genuine partners. Some of these SMEs have even joined our team full-time, allowing us to continually integrate valuable insights from those with hands-on experience in insurance.

Our ongoing collaboration helps us shape features and workflows that truly resonate with our users. We take in an enormous amount of feedback from SMEs, which can present prioritization challenges. To address this, we focus on shared goals—such as enabling efficient field viewing and editing, enhancing producer performance reporting, and customizing business rules and automations.

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5. Enabling User-Centric Configuration with the Chestnut Configuration Library

Feedback from our clients has highlighted variations in how they view, manage, and report on insurance data. These differences, while nuanced, often reveal crucial preferences in what fields should be visible, what details reports should contain, and how rules should function. To support this, we developed the Chestnut Configuration Library (Chestnut CL), a framework that allows users to intuitively configure the interface to meet their specific needs.

Our team has already rolled out Chestnut CL to address the most common areas where user needs diverge, and we will continue to expand this capability across our product.

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Looking Ahead: Designing for Growth and Innovation in Insurance

Chestnut’s UX design is already light years ahead of existing solutions, but we’re only getting started. The complexity and variety of insurance distribution workflows present an exciting challenge that motivates us to keep innovating. Each insight we gain and every adaptation we make is another step towards reshaping the industry standard for UX in insurance.

Learn more about our product and team at chestnutfi.com.

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