From effort to exchange: turning insurance quotes into a value-led experience
What is DriveScore, and how does it work?
The DriveScore app is centred on levelling the playing field. Young drivers can face car insurance premiums of £3,000 or more. Insurers use several factors to assess the likelihood of a claim and calculate a price:
- Your age
- The value of your car
- How many years you've been driving
- How many years of no-claims history you have
- Where you live
The opportunity for DriveScore was to make driving behaviour part of that assessment.
DriveScore measures how well you drive across six criteria and offers discounts for good driving. Building a score takes time, so users may wait until they have one before purchasing car insurance.
So, how do you make quoting (sometimes a whole year before your car insurance is due) feel urgent and valuable?
As in many fast-moving startups, we had design, technical and documentation debt. I needed to understand which areas of the app we could target. My first task was to create a domain map: a holistic view of the app, with a focus on monetisation.
Drawing on my experience in finance and conversion journeys, I focused on three areas:
- Top of funnel: where users begin their journey.
- Funnel: the steps users complete to get their result, usually through a form.
- End of funnel: the final steps before purchase. How could we help hesitant users make a confident decision?
Top of funnel
We took three approaches to our top-of-funnel strategy: iterative, evaluative and generative.
Iterative: personalising the marketplace
Before I joined, the team had started personalising the copy by dynamically mentioning the user’s car. This improved the click-through rate. I built on that approach by adding an image of their car.
Evaluative: testing rewards
My product manager and I knew that other price comparison websites (PCWs) used rewards to give users extra value.
Think Meerkat Movies, but for driving. We explored ideas including money off petrol and free tickets to drive-in films.
Our budget was more limited. As a startup, we needed to keep a close eye on customer acquisition costs. After exploring the rewards market, we chose Greggs: a familiar brand with straightforward onboarding and reward redemption. At this price point, we could test whether rewards encouraged users to get a quote before their renewal date. If the approach worked, we could explore more expensive options.
Generative: prompting users when they unlock their score
We surveyed users to understand why they were not getting quotes. The main reason was that they were “waiting to get their DriveScore”. However, the data showed that 70% of users who already had a DriveScore were still not getting quotes.
We wanted to understand whether users had forgotten the value of their score. I designed a full-screen modal that prompted users to start a quote at the moment they unlocked their DriveScore.
The idea was to pair the invitation to get a quote with a positive moment in the journey, when the value of the score was most apparent.
The proportion of users with a score who did not get a quote fell to 42%.
Improving the quote funnel
Although this case study follows the customer journey, we tackled the quote funnel first.
At the start of the project, our back-end developer went on sabbatical, our product manager was on holiday for three weeks, and our native developer resigned. That left me working with our front-end developer.
The domain map helped me identify an area we could improve with the team available: the question flow, which was built on the front end and also served desktop users.
I had noted several pain points while using the app for the first time. Before acting on those observations, I wanted to understand where users were dropping off and which screens we should improve.
There was no existing funnel analysis to answer that question, so I built one. The largest drop-offs were on these screens:
- Car ownership: 85% drop-off.
- Driver details: 60% drop-off.
- Claims and convictions: 55% drop-off.
I designed review screens that prefilled and preselected data, working closely with the front-end developer. When we showed the screens to users, the reduced effort made a strong first impression.
One user said, “If this first section was so easy, I just assumed the rest would be too.”
During usability testing, users said they did not know where to find the required details on their driving licence. I worked with the front-end developer to create an illustrated tooltip that showed them where to look.
We did not spend money on advertising in December because increased competition over Christmas made it uneconomical. We launched on 10 December. Conversion rose from 45% to 58% and subsequently held at around 55%.
Helping users decide at the end of the funnel
Once we had improved the question flow and the wider team had returned, we focused on the end of the funnel.
More users were entering and completing the funnel. We had reduced the number of questions from 41 to 31, but only 20% of users were clicking through to apply for a policy.
I interviewed 20 users to understand what they looked for when comparing policies. Common priorities included familiar features such as breakdown cover, reputable insurers, confidence in the claims process and price.
I probed further into price. When users said they wanted the “lowest price”, what did they mean, and how did they decide they had found it?
Users reported checking an average of 2.5 other comparison websites before purchasing. This suggested that some users might leave because they believed a cheaper policy was available elsewhere.
How could we improve users’ confidence in the price they were seeing and help them make a decision?
Effort articulation
I asked, “How many of the policies on the screen have a DriveScore discount?” Sixty per cent of users said all of them.
When I asked why, they pointed to the message at the top of the page saying their score had been shared.
This suggested an opportunity to explain more clearly what DriveScore does to find insurance policies and make its value more apparent on the results page.
I redesigned and animated the mini-donut component to communicate that value more clearly.
Quote Agent
From comparing prices to finding a better one
Users told us they checked an average of 2.5 other price comparison websites before buying. So even when we showed them a competitive price, there was still that question: “Could I get it cheaper somewhere else?”
Quote Agent gave us a way to answer that inside DriveScore. It surfaced suggestions for lowering their insurance price and helped users review the changes before going back to their quotes.
The benefit was simple: when you see a cheaper price after using Quote Agent, you have a reason to stay. Instead of heading to another comparison site and starting again, you can see the saving right there in the app. That gives users more confidence to make a decision, with less reason to keep shopping around.
Features
Timeline
Keep the user in control
Of course, we couldn’t just change someone’s answers and hope they were happy with the result. Users needed to understand what was being suggested and decide whether it was right for them.
The flow explains what Quote Agent will do, shows progress while it reviews the quote, and presents one suggestion at a time. Users can apply a change or skip it. Once they’ve worked through the suggestions, they see the updated price and how much they could save.
Review a suggestion, make a choice, see the result. Keeping that sequence clear helps users follow what’s happening. Showing the search also makes the work behind the quote visible, so the saving feels less like a number appearing out of nowhere.
What changed after launch
The completed Quote Agent work increased purchase rate at the bottom of the funnel by 4%. That improvement contributed to DriveScore’s best revenue month to date in August 2026.
For me, the opportunity was to help users feel confident enough to act. Quote Agent gave them a way to explore a better price without leaving DriveScore, then see what their choices had changed.
What were the results again?
Car insurance funnel completion improved from 45% to 58%
Conversion to purchase increased by 38% through increased articulation of value throughout the funnel
What did I learn in this project?
The goal was clear: improve conversion and help users get more value from the funnel. The path was less certain. When resources were constrained, I looked for other ways to reach the same objective.
Getting closer to the data and frontend constraints fundamentally changed how I designed the experience. Rather than designing idealised flows, I was able to work with what was technically possible and push it further. Like a painter who understands how to mix their own colours, this deeper understanding led to more practical, scalable, and impactful design decisions.