Launching new reports at Archipelago

Research, product design, data visualization, UX writing, design system

Archipelago gives commercial real estate insurance companies a place to clean up and enhance their property data. Owners and brokers can present insurers trustworthy information for better quotes.

I designed reports to help users analyze portfolios anywhere from a few dozen to thousands of buildings, with hundreds of data points each.

The challenge

Throughout the annual underwriting process, owners, brokers, and insurers review property data on Archipelago. Even though we already display a few metrics and charts, users couldn’t answer questions about data quality, risk estimates, and costs.

Archipelago’s self-serve reports would answer those questions and help users negotiate for fair pricing.

What I did

I owned the design for all reports, related features, and a new data visualization design system. For each report, I regularly met with internal stakeholders, industry experts, and customers to understand their needs, review report content, and validate decisions.

Impact

Our first launched report sped up deals by 3-4 days per account! Subsequent reports not only saved users hours of data analysis, but also contributed to deals with international customers totalling ~$5.2M in revenue.

The audience

We first targeted property owners and brokers. They need to prepare their data before going to market, so they’d benefit from getting detailed feedback on what insurers are looking for.

Later, we expanded to insurers, who’d skim over data to get a sense of the risk before doing any deeper investigation.

Getting the first report out the door

I started by designing the information architecture and the MVP navigation UI with these considerations:

• We start with reports at the portfolio level. We’d add more over time at the customer, portfolio, and property levels.
• Reports are limited by user roles, so not every user can see every report. 

Then I moved onto the Readiness Report, which tells customers how they can improve their data quality to earn insurers’ trust.

Before, the sales team would analyze prospects’ portfolios in Excel and create custom diagnostic presentations. Now we can generate the same content with a few clicks, saving a few days per account.

We took a few shortcuts to ship the first report.

• The report is a template, so we’d lose more nuanced customer-specific insights.
• The layout adapts to a 1-2 page downloadable PDF. It’s easier to share, but harder to present than a slide deck.
• We scrapped 2 other planned reports due to time and resource constraints.

Setting up a data visualization design system

Our design system didn’t support data visualization, so I added chart-specific guidelines and components. This made it easy to add new chart types, update branding, and share with engineers.

Risk Assessment Report
As part of a deal with a major international insurer, this report curates risk factors that matter to underwriters. Insurers can gauge risk with less effort, while owners/brokers can better anticipate questions and pricing estimates from insurers.

Previously, users would spend ~30 minutes analyzing data on Archipelago (or a few hours without Archipelago), but now it takes a few clicks to get the same information.   

Insurer Transparency Report
We partnered with an international insurer to create this report. They’d supply their proprietary risk grading metrics and bring their customers to Archipelago, starting with a pilot of 14 accounts.

On our end, we visualized these metrics by blending Archipelago’s design system with their brand guidelines.  

One technical challenge was that the insurer’s and our data models were structured differently, so linking properties was difficult. Instead, we displayed more address details so users can identify properties in the MVP.

Exposure Index
This report tested whether Archipelago can proactively predict risk, starting with hazard exposure. 

Long term, Archipelago could be a credible industry authority that can judge risk based on pricing, losses, hazards, and peer benchmarking. We could provide quotes to prospects and assist customers with price negotiations.

For the initial launch, the product strategists and PM developed a scoring formula based on exposure to natural disasters and climate risks. They built a clickable protoype in Google sheets that measured aggregrate and individual risks, which inspired my report design.

Valuation Summary
This report is part of a building valuation integration. Users can check if their cost estimates are close to market values and investigate red flag properties. For this report, I paired with a second designer. 

From interviews with brokers, we learned that the integration and report are massive time savers. A user could cut down at least 6-8 hours preparing an account for the insurance market.

Spreadsheets are surprisingly not obsolete.

Spreadsheets are still commonplace in the industry! I designed Excel templates that guide users through large volumes of data.

Change Analysis Export
This helps users monitor data edits at a large scale. It shows data changes between two points in time, especially when properties are added, disposed, edited, split apart into multiple line items, or combined into one.

Readiness Export
This complements the Readiness Report — it details data quality at the property level. Recommendations include properties to prioritize, data points to fill in, and documents to upload.

International customers got the most out of the exports. They have widely diversified, multinational portfolios that are split up by region and line of business. These spreadsheets conveniently summarize everything into one view for global risk managers.