APEX Envision — Farmers Insurance Homepage & Key Roles
A 13-week future vision engagement to transform the APEX agent experience
Farmers Insurance sought to counter the negative agent sentiment dominating APEX adoption by identifying agent pain points and fundamentally improving the user experience. The Salesforce Experience Design team — working in close collaboration with Farmers stakeholders — created a future vision blueprint across three focus areas: the APEX Homepage, Marketing Functions, and Onboarding + Help.
My contribution as Senior Experience Consultant and UI Designer centred on the homepage redesign and the key roles framework — translating 21+ agent and stakeholder interviews into role-specific homepage concepts, validated through usability testing using the System Usability Scale (SUS).
The engagement followed a three-phase process: Research & Definition (weeks 0–5), Co-Create & Align including a co-creation workshop (weeks 6–8), and Concepting & Testing (weeks 9–13). The JTBD framework guided interview questions across all three agent roles.
One homepage for three very different roles — none of them served well
The existing APEX homepage had a starting SUS score of just 26 — well below the industry average of 68. The core issue: it was designed for nobody in particular. The most useful information sat below the fold, the metrics shown weren't relevant to agents' actual daily tasks, and there was zero ability to personalise the view based on role.
Research surfaced six overarching themes driving the negative experience:
One size does not fit all. Agents wanted to personalise their experience, communications, and workflows.
Agents had low confidence in APEX data and Farmers' willingness to act on their feedback.
Poor usability was reducing productivity and creating confusion throughout the APEX experience.
Teams working independently resulted in low cross-collaboration and inconsistent customer experiences.
Lack of standardised tools and best practices had resulted in many different — often conflicting — ways of working.
Poor change management on previous launches had eroded trust in new releases before they even shipped.
Three roles — three fundamentally different jobs to be done
Through JTBD interviews, we identified three primary roles within Farmers who were the main APEX users. Each had distinct goals, tasks, and information needs — making a single homepage fundamentally inadequate for all of them.
Different roles, different homepages — each designed around real jobs
The homepage redesign was the centrepiece of the APEX Envision. I designed three distinct homepage experiences — one for each role — each tailored to surface the information that mattered most for that agent's daily work. Homepages were validated with agents using usability testing and rated on the SUS scale.
- High-level agency health check visible immediately above the fold
- Open tasks for self and team in a centralised, interactive list
- Visibility into sales pipeline and unworked leads with ability to assign from homepage
- Important alerts and agency news surfaced prominently
- Team performance reports — previously requiring manual report runs — shown at a glance
- Sales KPIs and FMTD progress visible at log-in — no report required
- Quick-access CTAs to start a quote or claim directly from homepage
- Upcoming renewals and birthday contacts surfaced as interactive lists
- Tasks, alerts, and agency news arranged for fast daily planning
- Unworked Leads list with ability to take action without navigating away
- Household Quick Find component on homepage — reducing clicks to locate customers from 4+ to 1
- Recently viewed households in utility bar for session continuity
- Alerts in list format for fast action without extra navigation
- Catastrophic event alerts surfaced prominently — previously hidden below the fold
- Reduced cognitive load by removing data irrelevant to the CSR's daily role
Customisation and quick links for all roles
- Customisable Quick Links — Agents can pin their most-used links to a persistent quick links section that follows them across the entire APEX experience, reducing navigation and enabling personalisation
- Household Quick Find — Search streamlined into a single component that also shows recently viewed households, saving significant time for agents who spend large portions of their day looking up contacts
- Birthday Summary Component — Higher-level view of upcoming birthdays in the weeks ahead, letting agents act at an individual or group level without running a manual report
- Catastrophic Alert Prominence — Natural disaster alerts moved above the fold and made visually distinctive, enabling faster claims processing when agents need it most
Future vision homepage designs — role by role
Each role received a homepage designed around their specific jobs-to-be-done, validated with users using the System Usability Scale.
From a SUS score of 26 to 78 — well above industry average
The role-specific homepage concepts were validated with agents through usability testing. The average SUS score across the three homepage designs was 78 — a jump of 52 points from the baseline of 26, and 10 points above the industry average of 68. Agents responded positively to the role-specific approach, with the elimination of irrelevant data and the surfacing of task-relevant information driving the biggest gains.