Challenge
RI3K (Reinsurance and Insurance for the 3rd Millennium) is the paperless trading service for the insurance and reinsurance industry. RI3K allows all types and classes of large commercial insurance and facultative and treaty reinsurance to be transacted over the Internet. RI3K has become central to the modern, paperless market, increasing efficiency, accelerating information, and driving out paper and cost.
The old RI3K was still in good shape but needed a fresh lick of paint, to highlight their products better and a rework of how it was built.
The main objectives were to:
- Create a design from scratch
- Reduce copy
- Highlight RI3K products
- Implement an extensible CMS
Solution
Design
Initially thinking about the products – what they provided to the user and their advantage. Imagery was linked each strapline. It was good time go through the design and bring out the advantages of our web applications – to give a solid feel to their products.
Straplines
The straplines written with the intention of trying to connect with RI3K’s users – helping them identify good reasons to use RI3K’s products.
- Accurate information
- Audit trails
- Faster for you
- Flexible, powerful, secure
- Made to measure
- Paperless trading service
- Time saving
- Work anywhere
These straplines and images were then linked with the pages they could potentially appear on. Once the visual sitemap was in place, it helped highlight the likely tone and how the design could base itself around the images.
Moreover, it opened up further conversations about the strategy, placement in the market and the RI3K brand perception.
RI3K products
For the design it was vital to highlight the advantages of our products to each user group – buyers, brokers and carriers. The home page was used just for that:
Opening thoughts were to use the products.
But it soon came to our attention that we could connect (in better way) to our users by distinguishing the benefits for each user group.
Milestones into a timeline
RI3K had a lot of achievements in its short lifespan and it was important to point out all of these. The original website had these listed out in the right hand column – using tabs to differentiate between each year. I wanted to convert how the information was displayed and a timeline instantly came to mind.
Development
When I joined RI3K I thought it would be a good idea to revamp the HTML for their marketing website. I also noticed that most of the HTML was hard-coded, meaning every change would be have to be changed through the UI team. Therefore, implementing a CMS would be useful as the UI team would have to only concentrate on design and development changes rather than content.
A new CMS had to be implemented – one with good extensibility and documentation to help the Business and Marketing teams handle content without our the UI team.
WordPress
Using this blogging software with its sophisticated article management. It was possible to create a CMS which allowed multiple pages and news categories.
