Putty

Putty

on-demand insurance by The Hartford

The Hartford Innovation Lab was founded in 2018 with the goal of bringing human-centered design to product development. The Lab’s first product, Putty, offered handymen the option of buying insurance for short projects as an alternative to traditional yearly coverage. As a founding member of the lab my responsibilities spanned the whole product lifecycle, from ideation to occasional front-end development.

  • UX & UI
  • design system
  • research
  • NLP
desktop and mobile mockup

Final UI

I led the visual design and hand off efforts. My deliverables included prototyped interactions (Greensock, CSS, After Effects), wireframes, site maps, and accessibility reviews.

A close up of a card UI element
mockup of two phones in perspective

Med-Fi screens

I led four medium fidelity sprints for Putty. Medium fidelity prototypes were used to assess the information architecture, user flow, and basic functionality at a lower level of design effort.

a sea of isometric mockups

Design system

One of my primary responsibilities was to evolve the design system to meet changing business needs. Within the course of a year Putty, grew from a splash site to a direct-to-consumer web app.

atomic design library components

Marketing content

Leveraging my skills in digital fabrication, I created a physical Putty logo using a laser cutter. Working with a lab mate, I composed a series of vignettes featuring the logo for Putty’s launch.

closeup of floorboards
shoes beside an orange traffic cone
the putty sign is held in place by a vice with a dremel in the background
tiles colored different shades of grey

NLP prototypes

Using IBM Watson, I created several Natural Language Processing (NLP) prototypes that paired underwriting factors with a chat flow. I did this by training a model on hundreds of user utterances. By triggering webhooks I was able to adapt to the conversation flow in real time. My approach was fast (completed in less than a week) and gave us the option of testing quickly.

watson diagram

Discovery phase

My contribution to the early stage design efforts included leading interviews, synthesizing findings, and generating drawings to be used as conversation starters as well as in low-fidelity exercises.

lo-fi collage
in-person interview
zoom interview