TIM: A Design Framework for Evolving Insurance from Transactions to Relationships
A decision-making lens for insurance in low-trust, high-stakes systems
I write occasionally about product and design decisions shaped by real constraints in fintech.
Why insurance design stopped working
Insurance products didn’t suddenly become complex.
Users simply stopped tolerating complexity they don’t immediately understand or benefit from.
Across Term, Health, and ULIP journeys, we saw a consistent pattern:
Users arrived with intent, but disengaged once the experience demanded patience, trust, or long-term imagination.
Traditional insurance design relies on three assumptions:
Users will educate themselves if we provide enough information
Rational comparison will drive confident decisions
Value is realised only at the time of a claim
All three assumptions are now broken.
Users skim, defer, abandon, or postpone — not because insurance is unimportant, but because the experience fails to justify effort in the moment.
This mismatch between how insurance is designed and how users actually decide is where most insurance experiences quietly fail.
What we observed across insurance categories
We studied user behaviour across Term Life, Health Insurance, and ULIPs through qualitative interviews with first-time buyers, existing customers, and users who had never purchased insurance.
Despite product differences, the behavioural contradictions were strikingly consistent.
Term Insurance
Users intellectually understand the need for term insurance, yet emotionally resist committing to it.
They want to “get it right” but fear irreversible decisions. Pricing dominates attention, while claim trust remains fragile and abstract.
Term is perceived as necessary — but thankless.
Health Insurance
Health insurance journeys exhaust users before they convince them.
Long research cycles, ambiguous exclusions, and early data capture create friction before trust is established.
Users don’t reject health insurance — they reject premature commitment.
ULIP
ULIP users don’t fear investment; they fear losing control.
They want to start small, observe outcomes, and escalate only after success is visible.
Confidence precedes commitment, not the other way around.
The core contradiction
Across products, users repeatedly asked the same implicit question:
“What am I getting today for the effort and money I’m putting in?”
Insurance design traditionally answers this question with:
Documentation
Education
Future promises
Users today demand:
Context
Agency
Immediate value signals
This gap — between future protection and present justification — is where engagement collapses.
Why existing insurance design approaches fail
Most insurance experiences rely on isolated tactics:
Marketing campaigns create awareness
Product journeys push completion
Post-purchase systems activate later
These layers rarely reinforce each other.
Educational content overwhelms instead of clarifying.
Campaign messaging dissolves once users enter the product.
Post-purchase value is invisible until something goes wrong.
The result is fragmented trust.
We didn’t need more features.
We needed a unifying design lens.
The TIM Framework
TIM is a strategic design framework built to address how users decide, not how insurance products are structured.
It combines three mutually reinforcing pillars that must exist together — not in isolation.
T — Timely
Users act when context is relevant, not when products are available.
Timely design means engaging users at moments where insurance decisions feel personally urgent:
Aging parents
Health milestones
Financial planning windows
Timing doesn’t create intent — it unlocks it.
I — Interactive
Users don’t trust static explanations.
They trust outcomes they can explore.
Interactive experiences allow users to:
Simulate coverage
Adjust variables
Compare consequences
Build confidence through play, not persuasion
Interaction replaces education as the primary trust mechanism.
M — More than a Policy
Insurance is used rarely. Payment is constant.
Users expect value between claims:
Utility
Visibility
Benefits
Organization
When insurance offers ongoing relevance, it stops feeling like a sunk cost and starts behaving like a relationship.
Why TIM only works as a system
Individually, each pillar exists in the industry today.
The failure happens when they operate independently.
A timely nudge without interaction feels manipulative.
An interactive tool without value retention feels transactional.
Value without context feels irrelevant.
TIM works only when:
Context creates attention
Interaction builds confidence
Value sustains engagement
Remove one, and the system collapses.
Stress-testing TIM in Health Insurance
We first applied TIM to Health Insurance because it carries the highest friction and skepticism.
The framework forced uncomfortable design decisions:
Delaying data capture until intent was earned
Exposing exclusions earlier instead of hiding them
Designing for exploration before completion
Not everything scaled cleanly.
Regulatory constraints limited interaction depth.
Business teams feared over-exposure of complexity.
But the framework held.
Users spent more time exploring.
Confidence surfaced earlier.
Drop-offs shifted later in the journey — a critical signal in insurance.
What TIM deliberately does not optimize for
TIM is not designed to:
Maximise immediate conversion
Simplify products beyond recognition
Replace regulatory obligations
It optimises for:
Decision confidence
Intent quality
Long-term engagement
Teams looking for short-term spikes will find TIM uncomfortable.
That discomfort is intentional.
Why this matters
Insurance doesn’t fail because users don’t understand it.
It fails because experiences don’t respect how users decide.
TIM reframes insurance design from:
“How do we explain this better?”
to
“How do we earn commitment over time?”
This shift changes not just interfaces — it changes priorities, metrics, and product conversations.
That’s where real impact begins.
Notes
This framework was developed collaboratively with design, research, and product partners and continues to evolve through real-world application.
I’m Arvind Sethia, a Principal Product Designer working at the intersection of design strategy, fintech, and complex decision systems. I publish selectively — subscribe if this line of thinking resonates.
Great read. Looking forward to more work from your experience! You have a very unique skillset of being able to bind all your experience across fintech products and categories.