boom / Abacai
Car insurance,
with a bang.
Helping people get covered and get on with their day, while challenging what car insurance could be.
- My role
- VP Design
- The company
- Abacai Technologies
- The work
- Brand · Product · Design leadership
Results I helped achieve
Sales in just over a year.
Written premium in the same period.
UK App Store rating.
App download rate.
From an idea to a brand, a live product and the first sale. Starting from nothing, then scaling fast.
Of customer demand serviced through automation with Abi, the AI chatbot.
Historical achievements from my time as VP Design at Abacai. Sales and written premium reflect the wider team’s commercial results.
Insurance needed
a different approach.
Abacai set out to challenge an industry that had been slow to change. boom was its first insurance product, bringing that ambition to life through a digital experience for buying and managing car insurance.
As VP Design, I created, led and grew Abacai’s design team, helping build boom from the ground up as a digital-first, data-driven motor insurance brand. In just over a year, boom generated more than 90,000 sales and £100m in written premium.
I managed seven designers across onshore and nearshore teams. As part of the Senior Leadership Team, I helped shape the product vision, strategy, proposition and roadmap, connecting the business ambition with the experience customers would use.
A different kind
of insurance experience.
I established the creative direction and managed the iterative development of two new core brand identities, boom and Leap, in under three months. For boom, bold colour, straightforward layouts and a distinctive visual language gave the website and app a character of their own.
The work below shows how those foundations carried from the brand into the product, making room for personality in a category often dominated by forms and small print.
Getting covered
was only the start.
Buying a policy is one part of having insurance. Managing it, understanding the cover and coming back at renewal are part of the same relationship.
The product work extended across those moments, bringing policy details, renewals and everyday tasks into one app. The app achieved a 4.8 rating on the UK App Store and a reported download rate above 80%, making it a central part of the customer experience.
Meet Abi.
A little help along the way.
Support was another part of making insurance easier to manage. Abi, boom’s AI chatbot, gave customers a way to get help through conversation.
Its eight visual states gave that conversation a face, from thinking and listening to confirming an action or flagging a problem. The animations below explore how those states can communicate through movement.
I led the creation of Abi, which serviced 40% of customer demand through automation, reducing the support overhead and giving the team more capacity for customers who needed personal help. Abi’s separate case study will explore that work in more detail.
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Making sense
of the options.
The Quote & Buy journey brought the commercial offer into focus: the price, the cover and the options available to the customer.
Designed and built in three months, it was a key delivery milestone. The desktop and mobile views below show the product alongside the wider creative work that gave boom its presence.
Good foundations.
More room for ideas.
Behind the product was a tokenised design system spanning brands and product libraries. I oversaw its process and documentation, helping reduce design and build time by 80%. That gave the team more room for testing, ideation and improving the experience.
Together, the product, design system and Abi show the breadth of the work: a customer experience, the foundations for delivering it and the support around it.
Editorial notes for final review ↗
- Add project dates and the reporting period for the app rating.
- Clarify the audience and measurement window behind the 80%+ download rate.
- Add the date and ranking basis before using the “UK’s #1 insurance app” claim.
- The Abi animations are a new portfolio demonstration, not a claim about the original implementation.