The Conversion Rate Uplift That Changed How I Think About UX Research

The FBD Insurance project produced outcomes that I'm still genuinely proud of: a 185% year-on-year increase in online sale conversion rates, a 164% increase in new business policies sold online, and a 165% increase in online revenue. These are transformational numbers for a project of any kind.

What produced them wasn't brilliant design, or a particularly clever technical solution, or an unusually large budget. It was finding the right problem to solve.

The Stated Problem

The stated problem on the FBD project was: 'Our website isn't converting enough visitors into customers.' This is a reasonable framing — it describes a real commercial pain point and points towards an obvious solution (improve the conversion journeys).

A design team that took this framing at face value would have spent the project optimising the quote journeys. They would have produced measurable improvement. They would not have produced 185% growth.

The Real Problem

The research phase revealed something more fundamental: visitors who arrived at fbd.ie with genuine intent to buy insurance were abandoning not at the quote journey, but significantly earlier — at the point where they needed to understand what FBD's products actually offered and why FBD was a better choice than a comparison site or a competitor.

The product descriptions were written in industry jargon. The benefit communication was weak. The brand's compelling positioning — 'Protection, it's in our nature' — was present in the marketing but absent from the product experience.

The real problem wasn't a broken quote journey. It was that the website wasn't giving customers a compelling reason to get to the quote journey.

The Implications for Research

This experience confirmed something I'd suspected but hadn't seen demonstrated so clearly: the most valuable product research is the kind that questions the brief, not just the executes it.

'Why are visitors not converting?' is a better research question than 'How do we improve the conversion journey?' The first question is open; it might surface problems anywhere in the user's experience. The second constrains the investigation to the journey that the team has already decided is the problem.

• Start research before you form a solution hypothesis. The solution hypothesis should be an output of research, not an input.
• Map the full user journey, not just the product experience. Problems often originate upstream of where they manifest.
• Question the brief. The most valuable research finding is often the one that reframes the problem entirely.

‍