Pibasure Case Study
(RE)Building PibaSure
We’d like you to meet two colourful characters who are a crucial part of this story; Lazy and Daisy. They’re the two opposing faces of PibaSure.ie, and they were created to help break down the complexities of insurance.
Lazy and Daisy
PibaSure, a collective of Insurance Brokers operating in Ireland, approached Lucidity in November 2010 about a potential redesign of their existing website. “The site had become outdated, we wanted to rejuvenate it and make it much more user friendly for consumers,” said Rachel Doyle, who oversaw the project for PIBA with David Holton. Both David and Rachel were key to the development of the site as it exists today, and worked with Lucidity throughout the development of the site to ensure it succeeded.
The previous PibaSure site had utilised a penguin-based character, but Rachel and David felt that this character was outdated, and that the website was no longer appealing to users.
“That character had lost its relevance to the message that PIBA Sure were looking to send,” said Guy Fagan, who oversaw the project for Lucidity. “We needed to create characters that were multi-platform friendly and would grow with the campaign.”
Although the previous character wasn’t working as predicted, the decision was made to stick with a character-based site. “We decided to add new characters that people coming onto the site would remember,” said David. PIBA wanted to utilise a new set of characters that would add friendliness to the site, while breaking down complex insurance jargon and making the insurance market easier for customers to understand, much like popular insurance sites such as confused.com or comparethemarket.com, both of which identify with particular brand characters.
Some early design work
The decision could have been taken to take the website in a more corporate direction, but both PIBA and Lucidity decided that the approachable design should be retained. “Generally speaking, a friendly site means a sticky site. A sticky site leads to a low bounce rate and a high engagement factor, which in turn leads to a higher conversion ratio for the client. That’s what it’s all about,” said Guy.
In consultation with the designers at Lucidity, the characters of Lazy and Daisy were developed. Alan Walsh, lead designer on the project, explains how they came to be;
“These were two characters based on the googly-eyed monsters you often see on car dashboards or keyrings. The character template was simple; Lazy was the clumsy, careless and foolish blue monster who continually finds himself in bizarre and outlandish trouble, whether it be in his car, on the train or having bought a new home, suddenly threatened by an asteroid. Lazy’s question is always simple: Am I insured? Daisy is the savvy, smart and friendly character who understands the insurance game inside out, representing the site, who answers his questions. The Lazy character is designed to help us relate to a character who finds themselves in an unforeseen bit of trouble and Daisy stands for Pibasure itself, helping us out.”
More 'Lazy' Concept Art
I asked Rachel and David how much influence they felt they had on the design of the new site, and was told that “every suggestion made by [PIBA] was taken on board and Lucidity were very accommodating in relation to our views and the way we saw the site working.”
After the design was agreed upon, the development process began, which encompassed wire-framing of the site, third party integrations to the development platform, presentation of the site, break testing, snagging, and hosting in a live environment. At each phase of the development, the PIBA were consulted and gave their approval.
On the 18th of October, the brand new PibaSure website went live, and since then it’s been experiencing a much greater volume of traffic than on the old site. PibaSure has been optimised for Search Engines, and is currently ranking highly for a great number of insurance search terms.
The new PibaSure Homepage
“I found Lucidity very professional, creative and easy to work with,” Rachel told me. David added “Lucidity were always full of ideas and their enthusiasm and flexibility made creating the new site a fun project to work on. They also have a tremendous support network in the background who have been extremely patient and professional in providing support to us.”
“We’re 100% happy”, David and Rachel told me when I asked for their thoughts on the final result. Guy echoed their sentiments. “It’s a site we are very proud of,” he told me. That’s certainly what we like to hear.
In the time since the site launched David has been particularly forward-thinking in driving PIBA on Social Media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, recognising the importance of a social presence in the current market as part of an all-encompassing digital strategy.
Have a look at the finished site here
