Frank Insurance Broker (Thailand)

Role:
Senior Product Designer

Focus:
Design, scale, and cross-product consistency

Context

I joined Frank at a very early stage, when it was still a small insurtech startup planning its expansion across Asia, starting with Thailand and Taiwan. The goal was to create a digital-first insurance experience that felt simpler and more trustworthy than traditional brokers.

As part of the founding design team, I worked closely with product and engineering to turn an initial marketing landing page into a real product. My focus was not visual polish, but defining product direction, user journeys, and a design approach that could scale while allowing fast experimentation. This was the starting point when I joined:

Frank consisted of a single marketing landing page, used to validate demand and explain the value proposition.
There was only one vertical flow: car insurance but no established UX direction.

Problem

The experience was designed as a marketing flow rather than a product journey. Users had to complete multiple steps and provide extensive information before seeing any real value, such as pricing or coverage options. This created friction, reduced trust, and led to high abandonment.

My first assumption was that we could reduce the number of interactions before showing a price. Inspired by e-commerce, where users see a product and its price early, I applied the same mental model to insurance to better match user expectations.

The core issue wasn’t visual design, but a misalignment between user intent, information architecture, and the complexity required to generate a quote. This became the starting point for iteration.

Our process.

The challenge

Before refining visual decisions, we focused on defining the UX foundations of the product. The main challenge was structuring the flow and collecting the required information in a way that felt simple and trustworthy, while still supporting accurate insurance quoting.

I started with early wireframes to map user journeys and explore different ways of gathering data, helping shift the experience from marketing-led to product-first.

Prototyping has always been a core part of my process, even at the wireframing stage. For this project, I focused primarily on mobile-first design, driven by the usage data we had for Asia at the time, where the majority of traffic was coming from mobile devices.

User flows

I designed user flows with a very practical scenario in mind: someone commuting, using their phone with one hand, potentially distracted and short on time. This meant prioritising clear hierarchy, reachable interactions, and progressive disclosure of information, ensuring the experience felt lightweight and manageable even in less-than-ideal conditions.

This approach helped ground early design decisions in real user behaviour, rather than ideal desktop scenarios.

After several iterations we end up with 3 main user flows: quote, customise and compare.

Focus group

While UI and visual design are areas I’m deeply passionate about, it was critical to validate the exploratory work before moving forward. We organised a focus group with Thai users to test early concepts and flows with real customers in our target market.

Sessions were fully recorded and translated with subtitles so the entire team could clearly understand the feedback. This helped align product, design, and engineering around real user behaviour rather than assumptions.

Participants were compensated with vouchers, and the insights gathered directly informed subsequent design decisions and refinements to the product experience.

User testing with Thai customers (recorded and translated).

UI and Iteration

Even at high fidelity, everything I designed was treated as testable, not final. Key UI decisions were intentionally created with multiple variations, allowing us to validate assumptions through A/B testing rather than relying on personal preference.

We used a range of tools, including Hotjar, VWO, and behavioural data from Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity, to understand how users interacted with the interface in real conditions. This quantitative feedback complemented the earlier qualitative research and helped guide continuous iteration.

This approach allowed us to refine hierarchy, messaging, and interaction patterns over time, ensuring the visual design evolved in response to real user behaviour and business outcomes, not just aesthetics.

The new refreshed homepage.

Filter pane option A.

Filter pane option B.

Visual design

The transformation was substantial. We evolved the experience into something simpler, more readable, and more functional aligning visual aesthetics with usability.

We introduced a new typeface to improve hierarchy and readability across touchpoints, created a horizontal version of the logo for better flexibility in digital layouts, and refined the color palette by removing the near-red tone to make the brand feel more consistent and trustworthy.

We also developed a new iconography system, designed specifically for product clarity. The updated icons improved comprehension of coverage details and made navigation more intuitive.

The result was a more modern, cohesive interface clearly positioned as a digital product, not just a marketing extension.

Reflection

Working at Frank taught me the importance of separating assumptions from evidence, especially in early-stage products. It reinforced that strong design is not about jumping to visuals, but about asking the right questions first, understanding user behaviour, and validating ideas as early as possible.

This experience also shaped how I think about progressive disclosure and friction in digital products. Reducing interactions before showing value had a direct impact on engagement and helped align the product more closely with familiar e-commerce mental models.

Finally, operating in a mobile-first, cross-cultural context highlighted how critical it is to design for real-world constraints - one-handed use, short attention spans, and varying levels of trust in digital services. These lessons have stayed with me and continue to influence how I approach product design, experimentation, and collaboration today.