Sam Chang / Ladder

Ladder
Reimagining life insurance for the digital age
TL;DR
Contributed to major redesign and rebrand of entire platform. Responsible for redesign of application process. Improved payments conversion by 11%. Created a scaleable set of solutions for Ladder's partners. View all projects I worked on at Ladder here.

Introduction

Ladder is an insurtech company that provides term life insurance policies through a digitized process. At Ladder, I currently work on a variety of surfaces, from rethinking how our life insurance application looks to shipping a new payments experience. Here are a selection of projects I've worked on since 2020.

2023

Re-route

Ladder’s mission is to protect families by helping people get covered through a policy. Still, we've had setbacks matching everyone with the best policy, which is not great for both our users and Ladder. In 2023, our Machine Learning team developed a model to improve these matches. I helped design a solution that utilizes this model.

Re-route

2022

First payment failure

In mid-2022, I became the design lead for a new product team dedicated solely to customer retention. As part of this new team, I designed a comprehensive solution prevent customers from missing their first payment.

Affordability

Affordability

Ladder’s mission is to protect families by helping people get covered through a policy that is right for them. As policy offers become more expensive, however, the rate of users accepting their policies drops. Users who feel that life insurance is outside of their affordable budget will not get the coverage their loved ones need. And rather than lowering their coverage amount, users elect not to get life insurance altogether due to it feeling unaffordable. I designed a treatment in our funnel to help users select a policy that fits within their budget.

Affordability

2021

Homepage redesign

A homepage for a product is a sacred space. It’s where the first interaction between a potential user and your brand occurs. It’s where you’re given your first opportunity to communicate who you are as a company to a potential customer. The homepage encapsulates your identity in one page. And in 2021, I was given the opportunity to rethink and redesign Ladder’s homepage.

Homepage redesign
Homepage redesign
Homepage redesign

Offer transparency

Our customers value transparency, and transparency can be seen as being concise and clear of Ladder's propositions such as 1) what's covered, or not covered, or 2) Ladder Policies do not have fees, billing fees, late fees, cancellation fees.

Transparency

2020

Ladder rebrand

Over the last three years, Ladder has focused on a brand filled with delight. Everything from the layout to the tone was centered around making life insurance more approachable. As the system became more complex, and we learned from each new user interaction, we decided that it was time to enhance our brand identity, therefore implementing a more profound user experience.

Rebrand

Rebrand

Billing

As a term life insurance company, Ladder relies on a subscription-based payment model. Users can choose to pay for their policies monthly with either their credit cards or through their bank accounts (ACH).

I was tasked with improving the conversion metrics for our billing transaction page—the page where users input either their credit card or ACH information.

Billing

Calculator

Like most life insurance providers, Ladder has a calculator that gives users interested in life insurance an overview of how much coverage they might need. Users will input different information about themselves into the calculator and receive an estimated coverage amount.

Calculator

Carousel page

After a user submits a life insurance application with us, we surface an intermediary page that we call the Carousel page. As a user is on this page, we are making a decision whether to offer that user a life insurance policy or not. The Carousel page is thus meant to be a place where users can wait and take a break from inputting information.

Carousel

☝️