Insurance in Bangladesh was paper-heavy, opaque, and deeply distrusted. Carnival Assure launched in 2017 as the country's first digital insurance aggregator — which meant there was no existing user behaviour to study, no local competitor to benchmark against, and no established mental model for what buying insurance online should feel like. Users would start applications and abandon them not because the product was broken, but because they didn't understand what they were buying or why they needed it. The design problem wasn't just usability — it was education, trust-building, and simplification happening simultaneously, in a market we were creating from nothing.
With no local data to start from, early decisions were grounded in direct conversations with prospective users, insurance agents, and people who had previously attempted to file claims through traditional channels. That research revealed that jargon was the primary barrier — not price, not distrust of the internet. Users understood the concept of insurance; they didn't understand what any of the documents or terms actually meant. The design direction focused on plain language first, visual guidance second, and process transparency throughout. Every major journey — policy purchase, comparison, claims, EMI — was rebuilt around the assumption that the user was encountering this category for the first time.
We replaced insurance terminology with plain conversational language across every touchpoint. This created internal tension — compliance and business stakeholders worried plain language would undermine perceived legitimacy. We held the position because user testing consistently showed that jargon caused abandonment, not confidence.
The claims journey was redesigned from an open-ended form into three explicit steps with document requirements shown upfront. The original flow asked users to gather documents mid-process, which caused most drop-offs. Surfacing requirements at the start felt counterintuitive but reduced abandonment significantly.
An EMI calculator was built as a real-time preview rather than a post-purchase option. The business assumption was that users would adopt EMI naturally. Research showed they didn't trust commitments they couldn't preview. Making the monthly figure visible before any decision was made drove a 40%+ increase in EMI adoption.
The design system was built to be product-agnostic from year two onward — colour-coded by insurance category, with reusable form and summary components. This allowed new product types to be added without redesigning flows, which proved essential as the platform expanded across life, health, auto, and travel coverage.
increase in EMI adoption after real-time calculator was introduced
Over seven years of continuous design ownership, Carnival Assure became the leading digital insurance platform in Bangladesh. EMI adoption grew by more than 40% following the calculator redesign. Claim abandonment rates dropped materially after the three-step claims journey launched. Comparison pages consistently record the highest engagement on the platform. The design system has scaled across multiple insurance categories without structural rework — a direct result of decisions made in year two that prioritised longevity over speed. Version 2 is currently in development. The design is complete — a ground-up visual refresh with a significantly improved information architecture and a more confident design language built on seven years of accumulated product understanding. The screens shown below are from V2.
We launched with limited upfront research because there was simply no existing market data to draw from. In hindsight, I would have invested more time before launch understanding how this specific audience thinks about financial risk — not insurance as a product, but the underlying anxiety it's meant to address. We spent the first two years correcting assumptions through iteration that deeper early discovery might have surfaced faster. Being first in a market is an advantage, but it requires more patient groundwork than a competitive launch typically allows for.