MetLife—MobileAppRedesign

MetLife's legacy mobile app was built around policy compliance, not around people. Customers only opened it under stress — filing a claim, replacing a card, checking coverage before a clinic visit — and left more confused than when they arrived.

The brief was direct: redesign the MetLife insurance app to improve usability, navigation, and user engagement. The constraint was equally direct — reduce cognitive load without hiding the regulated language the product legally requires.

Before touching a wireframe I pulled every public review of the existing app across Google Play, the App Store and Trustpilot. The ratings alone told the story — Google 1.7, Trustpilot 1.3, App Store 1.4 — but the review text told me exactly where the app was breaking.

I clustered the review data into recurring pain points, then paired each cluster with a concrete design response. This table became the north star for every screen that followed.

Before touching a wireframe I ran the existing app through a full Nielsen heuristic evaluation. Ten heuristics, screen by screen, issue and recommendation for each. The pattern that emerged wasn't ten separate problems — it was one problem repeated: the app never told the user where they were, what had happened, or what to do next.

Before touching a single pixel I needed to understand the real people behind the app. Two personas came out of the research — very different profiles, but a shared moment of failure at exactly the same step in the journey.

Synthesising the interviews, diary studies and support-log review, the same handful of failures kept surfacing — grouped into a wall of post-its that later drove every design decision.

I mapped the end-to-end journey across seven stages — Discovery, Download & Install, Onboarding, Registration, Explore, Submit Claim, Search Providers — and layered feelings, pain points and opportunities on top. The dips were consistent: onboarding felt cluttered, registration overwhelmed with fields, and the claim form gave no sense of progress or completion.

Every opportunity from the journey map went onto an impact–effort matrix. The top-right quadrant — high impact, low effort — became the shipping list for v1. Bigger structural bets like the full coverage transparency system moved to a v2 roadmap.

Card sorts collapsed the old menu into four primary destinations — Home, My Claims, Providers, Settings. The flow itself was redrawn so every regulated step had a single unambiguous next action: Splash → Onboarding → Login or Register → Home, with contextual entries into the claim wizard and provider map from the home screen instead of buried settings pages.

Greyscale wireframes locked the layout of every screen — onboarding, register, login, home, claim wizard, claim detail and provider map — before any color, type or motion decisions were made.

The visual language moved from dense corporate blue-on-white to a calmer neutral surface with a focused MetLife-blue accent. Poppins across a disciplined type ramp — 36 / 24 / 16 / 14 — with generous line-height so long-form policy content stays readable on a 6-inch screen.

The redesigned app opens on a calm home screen with a friendly empty state and a Quick Actions grid that surfaces the six jobs people actually come here to do — Submit a Claim, Find Medical Provider, Pre-Approvals, View Coverage, Family Members, Benefits & Limits.

The claim flow became a four-step wizard with a persistent progress indicator, a clear "Before you start" checklist, and a success screen that shows the claim number the moment it's submitted — closing the feedback loop that broke trust in the old app.

Provider search became a map-first experience with pins that carry names, filters for specialty and coverage, and an inline card that says immediately whether the provider is fully or partially covered under the user's plan.