Over the last 12 months we have been working with The Co-operative Insurance on their brand new car insurance product – Young Driver Insurance.

About the project

Working closely with our partner Wunelli and a number of different companies, Something Interesting designed, built and integrated the entire quote engine and dashboard for The Co-operative. We now continue to manage the websites and provide ongoing enhancements.

Car Insurance Quote Engine

The Co-operative Insurance wanted to redefine car insurance, especially for the younger driver. The cost of insurance for younger drivers is becoming more and more expensive. And its unlikely that the recent EU ruling on gender discrimination in car insurance is going to help matters.

By rewarding the safer driver with discounts mid-term and at renewal, The Co-operative Insurance hope to engage with the younger audience at the outset. This required some fundamental changes to the standard question set. Because of these changes, we spent a great deal of time working on the customer journey ensuring that the user experience was logical and led the customer through the journey smoothly.

From the price page onwards, the journey diverges from the standard approach. We needed to get the customer to understand the product and, importantly that a GPS system would be installed to measure the customer’s driving style.

All of this had to tie in with current underwriting rules and provide customers with clear & easy to understand messages. Because of this, we included validation and error messages in the web layer, providing simple explanations instead of insurance speak message.

Customer Driving Dashboard

As customers are rewarded for driving more safely, we needed a way of demonstrating the customer’s driving style back to them. This is where Driving Dashboard comes in.

Driving Dashboard shows the customer key driving style metrics over both the policy term and also a 45 day snapshot. The 45 day reports allow the customers to get a quick feel as to whether their driving style is improving, meaning that they will be rewarded for their better driving.

Along with these reports, we included a detailed alerts system, allowing dynamic messages and alerts to be sent to the customer’s driving dashboard based on pre-defined criteria.

This keeps communication between The Co-operative Insurance and their customers to the fore. Not many car insurance policies come with this level of communication about the current policy.

Administration Tasks

With a non-standard car insurance policy, new administration systems are required to fill the holes left by the standard policy administration systems.

Something Interesting established the short fall in current policy administration systems and provided a detailed and workable solution that integrates smoothly with the existing back office support systems. This allows The Co-operative Insurance to administer these policies as easily as their traditional policies.

Working with Something Interesting

By providing a highly motivated and experienced team of developers for this project, we were able to get the whole project to market quickly. This is something that may not have been so easy to do using an in-house development team that have other pulls on their resources.

Because our entire team (designers, developers, project managers etc) work from the same location, communication is quick and clear. A project of this nature is likely to take a number of detours from the original project path as the project matures. By having our team available we are able to quickly change direction – with everyone kept up to date with movements in the project.

The Co-operative Insurance also needed to be satisfied that we would be diligent with the development, especially from a data security point of view. Working closely with their team on due diligence, we were able to meet their exceptionally high standards for security.

Something Interesting is now working towards obtaining the ISO270001 standard.

For more information about our services, contact Steve on 023 928 3725.

From December 2012, car insurance companies throughout the EU will be unable to use gender as a rateable question when selling car insurance policies.

This ruling will inevitably mean that young female drivers will see their premiums increase, as it’s unlikely that these companies will lower the premiums for young male drivers.

Having worked on a couple of car insurance sites, I feel I have a reasonably good understanding of how these sites and companies work. Which is why I am really disappointed in this ruling.

Statistics

I am sure that over the years, insurance companies have been heavily researching the risks and the claims they have received. All of this data must have been put through countless databases and through the hands of hundreds of statisticians. And they continue to review their claims on a daily basis.

So, after all these people have used all these tools at their disposal to crunch all of this data, it is STATISTICALLY more likely that a young male driver will make a claim than a young female driver would. And this is coming from someone who was once a young male driver and paid these premiums.

A level playing field

So, in their quest to create a level playing field, the EU have made things worse for 50% of those people taking out car insurance policies. Won’t this potentially lead to more fronting or more people just not insuring their cars?

If it is a statistical proof that some people are more of a risk, then these people should pay the higher premium.

It is the statistics that make the playing field level.

Eli Pariser gives a remarkable talk to a TED audience on a phenomenon he calls ‘filter bubbles‘.

The concept of filter bubbles dictates that Internet audiences are the subjects of continual contextual bias. Pariser suggests that everything from search engine results to Facebook news feeds have become algorithmically tailored to suit the individual. The problem, he states, is that the concept of the individual is no longer based on salient criteria but by subtle and subconscious means that we have no control over.

The talk features a study undertaken by Netflix engineers who wanted to know why certain types of films were requested and subsequently managed to move up through a users queue more quickly than others. Their findings suggested that people would often add intellectually stimulating films to their queue in order to fulfil future, long-term aspirational goals, but would ultimately choose more entertaining films to watch in the short term.

Research into this sector is incredibly interesting to us as web developers. It helps us to gather a sense of where our industry is moving and how it will look when it finally gets there. As developers, we see targeted advertising as an exercise in algorithmic filtering. As consumers, we largely pass off effective advertising as a happy coincidence. The average user gives little thought or credence to the idea that a particular advert appearing at a particular time is in any way a premeditated or informed decision.

As a society we are becoming increasingly invested in the Internet. We live in a world where news stories break on Twitter before the television. Where Wikileaks has continually beaten traditional press to the punch. For many these outlets champion the Internet as a utopian ideal, a place that affords us an unparalleled freedom of expression. But what we are seeing lately is an increasing effort by the commercial sector to restrict and filter this information. One only has to look towards issues of net neutrality and privacy debates to see that the geography of our digital landscape is slowly shifting. The question is whether this is for better or worse.

We’ve had a busy six months, working on some very large and complex sites. Although this has been good, the team have all been working on different projects individually with little overlap.

The time had come for us to do something different and get our teeth in to a project we can all work on. So, today we started on our first ever hack day.

What is a hack day

In essence, a Hack Day is where a team of developers get together and all work on a project for one or two days. Ideally at the end you should have a working product.

Each of the developers within Something Interesting has their own section of the project to work on with everything (hopefully) coming together at the end of the day.

What are we working on?

Yesterday we did the setup work, buying a domain name, setting up hosting and SVN etc.

We also came up with the concept and discussed how it would work and any potential pitfalls. The concept is quite complex with a lot of unknowns which we will need to get past.

Right now we are working on the database set up, writing code to do the caching of responses and configuring the connection to the Last.fm API.

Update – 11:30

Logo Concept Agreed

After a few different variants we’ve come up with a concept for the logo which we are going to use.

This will be refined later in the day.

Update – 15:51

Just over an hour to go and its starting to look like this is going to be a bigger challenge that we first thought. So far we have:

Written scripts to create images on the fly.
Hooked in to the Last.fm API and retrieved and cached data successfully.
Built the database.
Created design for simple, functional homepage (below).
Coded up front end functionality.
Changed our minds on the logo concept we agreed on 3 hours ago.

Update – 17:30

Close, so very close, but not good enough to release just yet. We’ve got all the functionality working and most of the hard work done. Just couldn’t quite get it to a polished enough state to be released.

We have learnt some good lessons though, especially that swift and agile development is easy if everyone involved knows what they are doing and has an equal distribution of work. Ultimately on a project like this, you can only go as fast as the slowest wheel. And some of the parts of this project just took too much time to complete by one person and couldn’t be easily shared to another person.

If you run a web agency and haven’t tried this before I would recommend it. It teaches you a lot and gives you a great insight in to how the team work. It also gives your team something interesting to work on… which, lets face it, everyone needs sometimes.

We will send an update when we launch it on Twitter . Would love to know your thoughts and feedback.

Steve

On top of a unhealthy supply of tea and coffee, we’ve recently become hooked on bubble gum.

So, to stop annoying the guys in the local shop, we decided to buy a whole box of them…. lets see how long this lasts.

We have just put up the latest two pieces of artwork for the office – hope you like it.

Thank you JP.

Over the last 10 days, our TrackRecord PayPal account has been suspended – apparently due to a new EU law on money laundering. This has meant that we have been unable to take any payments for our software, leaving a load of customers in a tricky position and us desperately jumping through each new and challenging hoop PayPal put in our way.

Now, I fully understand that PayPal are being ruled by EU laws and regulations, however, there are few points I would like to make. Maybe PayPal will listen, maybe they won’t, either way this little vent does make me feel ever so slightly better about all the business we have lost out on recently.

Use the phone

Our account with PayPal ticks along quite nicely normally. Money comes in and, periodically, we take money out. However, before suspending our account PayPal thought it would be sufficient enough to just send us an email.

Over the last few months, we have seen more and more spam pretending to be from PayPal. It has got to the point now where our spam filter just strips out anything that comes from PayPal. Hardly surprising when I personally get about 10 emails a week from spammers masking PayPal.

However, PayPal seem to think that just sending an email saying that the account is going to be suspended will suffice.

If you are going to stop one of your customers from taking any money, and therefore effectively closing their business, please could you pick up the phone and give them a call to let them know?

No supervisors

After the third call to “helpdesk” asking for someone to sort this out, only to be told that my “request will be prioritised and dealt with accordingly”, I asked to talk to a supervisor in the vain hope this would sort the issue.

I was told that supervisors do not take incoming calls? Seriously, what would a supervisor in a call centre be expected to do if not to accept the occasional call from people who want to get a suitable answer?

Can’t receive an email

The reason we were suspended was because we weren’t verified. Doesn’t matter that the money from PayPal goes in to our Natwest account (for which I had to show all sorts of ID, birth certificate, utility bills, passport, credit checking etc etc), they still needed to see some ID.

We uploaded a copy of my driving licence twice through their online forms. Neither time did it appear to stick. Fortunately the guy at the call centre was on hand to tell me that we probably didn’t upload it properly.

As a web design and development company we have at least a vague understanding of online forms, file uploads etc. We know how to use them, we’re not stupid.

When I asked the guy at the call center whether they had an email address I could send a copy of my driving licence to, I was told they didn’t because “they won’t allow emails to be sent to them in case of viruses”.

Honestly, can PayPal and all their millions not afford a virus checker, a quarantined server or anything else to be able to accept attachments? Really?

And the last kick in the nuts

So, eventually we managed to upload my driving licence. Because this is a business account, I decided to blank out my home address, didn’t really want PayPal knowing my home address for what is a business account.

After a couple of days of having my ID, they mail me back to let me know that they won’t accept it because I had blanked my home address…. *sigh*

We have now, hopefully, jumped through all of their hoops and done everything they have asked of us. Lets wait and see how long it takes them to allow us to carry on doing business so we can get back to paying them their commissions for their rather shabby service.

We’ve been busy prettifying our meeting area. Much better for our clients when they stop by for a cuppa and a chat.

New additions include:

• Our supersized logo, printed and framed again by our friends at Southsea Gallery
• Wall graphics to frame the whole piece
• Vibrant new meeting chairs, no corporate reception chairs for us!

We hope you agree that it looks like a fun and inviting area for our clients both new and old.

At Something Interesting we love designing and building cool websites and apps.

Working from a close-knit lively studio in Southsea, Hampshire, we all get together and work on all projects together. Since launching our new app and taking on some lovely new accounts, we are now looking for a junior developer to join the team and get immersed in what we do.

What we need from you

• You may not have had ‘commercial experience’ that is not a problem. What we are looking for is a thirst and desire to build stuff you love.
• You need to be flexible, approachable, interesting, full of ideas but understand that a lot of time you will be dealing with a team.
• We like personalities! You will be dealing with our clients from day one so we need someone who can eloquently explain their reasons for doing things.
• We use a lot of different technologies, all in a Mac based office. You will need to be able to throw your hand at different languages over time.
• We need experience in the usual XHTML, CSS, LAMP (XML would be nice). We are a Mac based office.

What we can offer you

• A friendly, lively place to work where communication between the team is key.
• Involvement in new and interesting project, some in-house, some client based.
• Exposure to new a different technologies to keep you entertained.
• Relaxed dress code.

Interviews start 13th August

This is a great opportunity for someone who has little or no commercial experience but wants to get in to web and app development as a career. To get started please send your CV to jobs@somethinginteresting.co.uk

Love the BBC

For years I’ve been using the BBC website to get my daily fix of news, sport, weather and the Friday quiz. Although other websites (The Guardian, The Times – before you had to pay and The First Post) also provide great content, interesting articles and some very level headed journalism, the BBC is the granddaddy of it – it just does things better.

So when I spotted today that they have leaked some of the screenshots for their new site, I had to go and have a look. As expected I wasn’t disappointed – it looks good.

We have focused on design and navigation, looking to see how we can make all the existing content we produce each day easier for you to find, use and share. – BBC

The good points

From the small screenshots they have supplied, there are couple of points which I like the look off and can’t wait to see in the flesh.

Left hand nav gone
They have got rid of the left hand navigation which now gives more horizontal space to let the copy breath.

Most popular promoted
They have promoted the ‘Most Popular’ series, which I always look at to get a quick feel of what the other BBC news readers find important.

Read around a subject
Sometimes I find I get to the end of an article and want to read more around it. More focus has been given to related stories with links to related articles and news stories featured at the bottom (and sometimes throughout) the story.

It might be nice if these included off-site links recommended by the article author as well, but I can probably understand the BBC’s resistance to linking to too many other sites.

Not sure about…

Although the screenshots are relatively small, there are two major things that seem to be bothering me.

Is there just too much there?
On the homepage (screenshot 1) is there just too much much fighting for attention?

It may just be the graphics they have used, but the main header and image are fighting with the content on the top right (videos) and the image below these. When we see this full screen I may well be completely wrong.

Do you really need to print this?
Why is there a print icon featured in the share icon set (screenshot 8)? I would have thought that the BBC would not encourage printing of their content in this environmentally friendly society.

I know this won’t stop people printing (they can still click print in their browser) but I have never printed ANYTHING from the BBC news website in the last 5 years of reading it. Wouldn’t this space (albeit small) be better used for something else? Maybe a link to comment on the story to encourage emotional buy in from their users.

You can see the screenshots they have posted here http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2010/07/bbc_news_website_redesign.html

Would love to know your thoughts on this.