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Peak Re – 2020
Creating a Strong Identity through Strategic Design
My Role
Design Lead
Timeline
3 months
Team
Project Managers
Designer
Web Developers
Responsibilities
Content Audit
Design System
Component Library
Visual Design
Motion Mockups
Interaction Design
Prototyping
Responsibilities
Content Audit
Design System
Component Library
Visual Design
Motion Mockups
Interaction Design
Prototyping
Overview
As lead designer, I led the PeakRe website redesign, collaborating with a designer, content strategist, and remote developer. The goal was to modernize the digital presence of this reinsurer specializing in emerging markets, aligning it with their evolving identity and mission.
The outdated website lacked brand expression, buried resources in PDFs, and lacked a content publishing strategy. This redesign was a foundational step in PeakRe’s rebranding, creating a cohesive, scalable digital presence reflecting their core values.
Using a component-based design, I streamlined collaboration and ensured consistency, enabling efficient development, testing, and future scalability. The result is a modern, user-friendly website effectively communicating PeakRe’s vision and global impact.
High-level Goals
01
Redesign the website and align content strategy to establish a new brand identity highlighting Insights, Culture, and Agility, ensuring adaptability to future business needs and a seamless user experience.
02
Develop a scalable and sustainable website to support future business growth and maintain a seamless user experience.
My Design Approach
We launched the project by establishing a firm understanding of the client's business objectives, user requirements, and existing challenges. This allowed us to define a realistic scope and ensure our solutions aligned with both strategic goals and practical constraints.
From these insights, we developed specific design goals, ensuring all decisions reflected the brand's values. Ensuring the resulting website meets present needs and is adaptable for future growth.
01
Discover & Define
Engaging Stakeholders to Clarify Requirements
To kick off the project, we sat down with seven internal teams—management, underwriting, HR, and finance—to get a feel for what everyone needed. These interviews were key for figuring out each team’s priorities and expectations, which ultimately shaped the design and development.
Client’s Requirements
Improve communication through integrated tools and a user-friendly platform.
Enhance recruitment by highlighting career opportunities and company culture.
Showcase expertise and values, positioning it as a leader in emerging markets.
Mapping Target Audience Groups and Their Needs
We pinpointed PeakRe’s main audience groups to ensure the website content spoke directly to their needs. By consulting with stakeholders and conducting analysis, we mapped out different user groups and their key interests. This allowed us to create relevant and useful content, ensuring everyone understood the website’s purpose.
Users’ Needs
Clients (Existing and Potential)
Information on PeakRe's expertise, services, and track record, including industry reports, case studies, and thought leadership.
Business Partners
Similar information to clients, highlighting PeakRe's market leadership and capabilities.
Potential Talents
Details on company culture, career opportunities, and employee benefits.
Identifying Content and Brand Materials to be Repurposed
A content audit revealed valuable but hard-to-find PDF content, highlighting the need for more intuitive content organization for immediate access and future content creation. The previous brand presence didn’t fully reflect its identity, and this website redesign represents a significant step in showcasing Peak Re’s new direction.
02
Goal Setting
Setting Actionable Goals
Following discovery, actionable design goals were established to address identified challenges and guide design decisions. This ensured alignment between user needs, business objectives, and company aspirations.
Design Goals
Show, Not Tell
Use visuals and relevant content to highlight Insights, Culture, and Agility, minimizing text-heavy descriptions for quick user comprehension of the company’s operations and identity.
Discoverable
Restructure and prioritize content for easy access to valuable resources via improved navigation and intuitive information organization.
Scalable
Create flexible tools and structures to support PeakRe's growth and facilitate future content additions, ensuring the website's relevance and effectiveness.
03
Design & Refine
Goal 01
Show, Not Tell
Hi-Fi Prototyping
To address client hesitations with wireframes, a high-fidelity prototype (featuring a landing page and video mockup) was developed. This proved crucial in establishing trust and facilitating more in-depth project discussions. The subsequent presentation not only built valuable stakeholder connections but also unlocked access to further resources and streamlined design and development collaboration.
Visual Direction
Peak Re’s core values—Insights, Culture, and Agility—initially seemed vague. Through engagement with their team, underlying principles emerged: building knowledge and expertise through local connections. “Making meaningful connections” drives their insights, culture, and agility, informing the visual direction. This included a rational yet friendly typeface, reflecting their knowledgeable and down-to-earth nature (Insights and Agility). Dots and lines (representing actions and effects) became key visuals, and interactive graphics explored “meaningful connections” for each brand quality.
Typeface
Gilroy’s geometrical and bulbous form strikes a balance between logic and friendliness. Its large x-height enhances readability, especially in smaller sizes typical of UI elements. This makes it well-suited for UI applications. Crucially for Peak Re’s needs, Gilroy supports tabular figures, essential for clear presentation of financial data. This versatility makes Gilroy a strong typeface choice for a variety of contexts.
Key Visual Language
We used connecting lines and dots as a recurring motif to represent “Making Meaningful Connections”.
Conveying Brand Personality Through Animation
The homepage features a dynamic animation to convey the company’s forward-thinking and agile values. A prominent, forward-moving arrow creates a positive first impression, reinforcing the brand’s core message. Connecting lines, designed to resemble pulses, symbolize the dynamic interactions between key players (represented by dots), illustrating how collaboration drives progress and embodying PeakRe’s team and culture.
Layering Content for Sophistication and Purposeful Interaction
The design emphasizes a layered content approach and purposeful interaction. This means the design adds visual depth without overwhelming users, guiding attention to key information in a smooth and intuitive way. Subtle visual cues, like hover effects and smooth transitions, provide immediate feedback, creating a sense of engagement and control.
Layered Structure
The layered approach adds visual depth without overwhelming users, guiding attention to key information.
Purposeful Interactions
Hover effects provide immediate feedback, creating a sense of engagement and control.
Promoting Company Culture and Its People
The redesigned website significantly improves PeakRe’s employee engagement and talent acquisition. The previous site didn’t effectively showcase the company’s culture and people, which this redesign directly addresses. By incorporating employee quotes, in-situ photography, short stories, and clear benefit outlines, the site makes working at PeakRe both tangible and appealing. This enhanced careers section, reflecting PeakRe’s growth and values, supports both attracting and retaining top talent—a key design goal.
Quotes from Staff
Quotes from Staff helps to humanize the company to make it more approachable.
In-situ Photography
In-situ photography helps to make the experience more tangible.
Integration with Content
To ensure website content aligned with design goals, I collaborated with a designer to outline page structures and identify content gaps. This provided a clear framework for the copywriter to create targeted content.
Recognizing that generating relevant content is often underestimated, I provided content templates and guidelines to different teams, enabling them to submit sample content. This collaborative approach ensured consistency across departments and informed interface design, seamlessly integrating content and layout.
Goal 02
Discoverable
Considerations in the Main Navigation
The Peak Re website menu is intentionally structured to highlight the company’s priorities and cater to the needs of its target audiences.
Improving Discoverability and Presentation of Insightful Content
The redesign focused on maximizing content discoverability. Previously, valuable insights were buried within PDF newsletters, limiting user engagement. The new Knowledge Centre centralizes all content—thought pieces, videos, and research reports—within a user-friendly platform. Content tags and filters cater to diverse audiences, and key themes supporting PeakRe’s emerging markets expertise were identified and highlighted. Custom icons representing their on-the-ground work and expertise in climate crisis reinsurance (a common risk in emerging markets) were developed. This structured approach enhances readability and engagement, allowing users to easily browse and explore content in various formats.
Filters
Content in the PDF was made available and recurring content themes identified to allow audience to find relevant content easily.
Insights Took Centre Stage
We made sure valuable insights can be assess easily across the whole website.
Custom Icons
Custom icons were created to signal different types of thought pieces.
Categorization of Insights
Different types of thought pieces were categorized for easy access.
Enhancing Synergy Between Website and Social Media
A content strategy that links the website and social media channels allows concise social media messaging to drive users to the website for more detailed information. This interconnected approach expands the reach of PeakRe’s expertise and strengthens its position as a thought leader by connecting internal experts with external audiences.
Publishing Plan
A content publishing flow was developed to help client understand how to integrate the different channels.
Event Publishing Objectives
Publishing objectives were made clear by laying down the kind and types of content to be published in which channel to achieve intended effects.
Goal 03
Scalable
Component-Driven Design for Efficiency and Scalability
A component-driven design system was central to Peak Re's website redesign, prioritizing scalability and maintainability. Reusable content blocks empower content creators to maintain design consistency without technical expertise. This approach enhanced systematic thinking, making testing and iteration more efficient. Close collaboration between designers and developers ensured functional and responsive components across devices, improving design efficiency and future scalability.
Content Updates with Style
We made it easy for our client by creating pre-designed content blocks in the CMS to empower content creators, streamlining publishing without requiring advanced technical skills.
04
Final UI
A Seamless, Scalable Design Across All Devices
The implemented design provides PeakRe with a flexible, user-centric, and scalable website that adapts seamlessly across all screen sizes. The thoughtful layout and content deliver a sophisticated and intuitive user experience.
05
The Outcome
Results
The PeakRe website redesign was a success on improving usability, content discoverability, and visual appeal to align with the company’s brand identity and business goals.
While the PeakRe website redesign appears to have achieved its design goals, the measured improvements in user engagement—new users, page views, and time spent per visit—lack precise quantification. This is largely due to limitations in our post-launch engagement with the client, which restricted opportunities for ongoing observation, analysis, and iterative improvement. Furthermore, a lack of comprehensive quantitative data from the original website hindered the establishment of a robust benchmark against which to measure progress.
Consequently, while the narrative surrounding the redesign is positive, the evidence supporting this assessment is somewhat constrained.
06
Learnings
The Importance of Adaptability in Project Design
Creating a high-fidelity prototype for the PeakRe redesign project significantly improved stakeholder trust and collaboration, leading to a successful design solution. Adaptability is crucial in design. Designers need to be willing to adjust their approach based on the needs and preferences of the client. Designers should not fixate on the tools, but about what he can use to achieve his goals.
The Importance to Digging Deep Beneath the Surface
Avoiding ambiguity and assumptions is crucial for discovering the common thread behind the key values, which then enables a strong design.
Content Restructuring is Time-Consuming
The process of converting and restructuring printed materials into a digital format was labor-intensive. While successful, a more efficient content migration strategy could have saved time, allowing for a quicker implementation of the final design.
Testing and User Validation are Crucial
With limited user testing, we relied heavily on internal feedback to refine the design. While this approach worked to an extent, incorporating external user feedback during the discovery and validation phases could have exposed blind spots and enhanced the design’s overall effectiveness.
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