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Ironsure

- the first ever wholly online motor insurance

Irontrades, one of the largest insurance companies in the UK, approached us in 1998. They had never dealt directly with the public before, always going through brokers. They wanted to develop the first wholly online insurance service, starting with motor insurance to begin with. The site would enable people to enter three pieces of information only - their name, car registration and postcode - and get a preliminary quotation almost instantly (usually within 30 secs). This required an enormous amount of development work from a technical point of view, as the automated process of checking the details against the various back-office systems and databases involved in the quoting process was very complicated. As well as the technical build, we were asked to provide some preliminary concept designs for the site, to be refined later (see below). The look we eventually fixed on after quite a lengthy development process was a clean, easy look with minimal top-level navigation on the left 'moulded' bar, and self-explanatory headers and buttons in the main page. The quotation and buying process was very fast and easy - four pages and about six minutes from start to finish - in contrast to some of ironsure's later rivals (despite their claims!).

The 'look' of the left hand bar was taken from an early design which was based on the idea of the textured vinyl/plastic and chrome of a car dashboard. The moulding and all the rollovers effects for the buttons were created in Photoshop.

Below are the original four designs for the entry page, carrying the ironsure (or 'screensure', as it was then) branding. My favourite was the top left, but the one that was chosen was the 'moulded dashboard' look of the bottom left. This proved to be impractical when we came to build the site, but the moulded look was kept as a menu bar on the left of the site and on the buttons.

We also designed the ironsure logo (below). This was a lengthy process, too, involving two name-changes and many iterations of the concepts. This can be a very frustrating process sometimes, particularly if the client doesn't really know what they want - you find yourself conceptualising in a vacuum as the client rejects idea after idea without being able to tell you why! In this case, though, although a long process it was a happy one as ironsure always had constructive comments on the various concepts that were presented to them, allowing us to go away and work on the next iteration with positive feedback as to what was liked or disliked about the previous one. The various stages the logo went through can be seen in the logos part of this section of the site.

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