RMS

Senior Design Director, Originate 2014 – 2015

Evaluate risk for insurance portfolios.

RMS (Risk Management Solutions) is the world's leading catastrophe risk modeling company. From earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods to terrorism and disease, RMS helps financial institutions and public agencies understand, quantify, and manage risk.

While I was working at Originate, we partnered with RMS to launch RMS(one), a next-generation software platform to transform the world’s quantification of risk through open, real-time exposure and risk management.

As Senior Design Director at Originate, I led the prototyping, user research, user experience, and product design for the component-based application.

The Challenge
RMS had relied on antiquated applications to run models and export the results for analysts. As models had become more complex, the applications and user experience could no longer support the data set requirements to process, organize, analyze and share the results. 

An Iterative Process

• Spent 2 months researching complex customer groups, user personas and workflows

• Established universal component design rules for custom integration and ongoing development

• Created and tested 6 high-level concept prototypes, each undergoing 20-30 iterations

• Conducted over 90 user experience tests

No Two Users Are The Same
For product design and development, we have four distinct families of users, which have been based on functionality, data access, and scale/performance requirements. The Portfolio Manager persona is the key stress test as they have the widest requirements to fulfill for their role.

Users live on a spectrum of technical capability. Some clients choose to develop on top of the platform rather than use the application. Those who use the application required a great deal of customization/configuration. Additionally, workflows vary greatly by role and by company.

Customers Needed A Reason To Believe
After a $150M failed attempt to build a new solution, customer confidence was at an all time low as threats of customer attrition were being made regularly.

Solutions
Modular system, enabling parallel design and staggered release of multiple applications - which would signal progress, build momentum and enable the immediate gathering of feedback. Flexible solution of the multiple mini-applications, each of which had extensive feature and data access control, including:

• Importing, sharing and modifying data

• Model evaluation and configuration

• Exploring data versions and model results

• Creating, modifying and running reports

• Extensive customizable dashboards

• 4 layers of customization - Organization Admin, Tenant Admin, Business Admin and User Profile

The RMS(one) platform is a risk management platform for the insurance industry. Within a single platform, risk modeling is integrated together with scalable exposure and loss analytics. As an open, big data and analytics platform, RMS(one) delivers a timely and consistent view of risk across all users. The platform also allows custom APIs to be imported from a market platform allowing customization on the application for various risk analysis needs.

RMS User Interface Guidelines
During development, my team and I wrote and designed a reference archive of the visual language, such as typography, styles and color palettes, used to create the application. The UI style guide was developed to be a living document which details all the modules of the RMS(one) application.

The principles of the RMS UI Guidelines were: legibility, extensibility, familiarity, and customizability. These underlying principles empowered the team of RMS product owners, developers and designers to use the repository to keep the application looking consistent and not have to reinvent elements.

The UI Guidelines initially prepared for this first application became the central foundation of further RMS(one) interface launches.