As usability expectations have been pushed to the max and user experience has become increasingly commoditized, the clunky and confusing experiences that still dominate insurance—both internally and in customer-facing products—have become more noticeable and less acceptable.
Customers feel it, and employees do, too.
Recent research by Insurify shows that one in four younger customers has switched insurance carriers due to frustrating digital interactions. At the same time, seven in 10 young employees say they would consider changing jobs for better workplace technology, according to a study published last year by Adobe.
These trends point to something many insurance organizations are already experiencing firsthand: poor digital experiences are no longer just a usability issue. They affect retention, operational efficiency, and ultimately competitive advantage. In other words, they are a liability.
And yet, despite years of investment in digital transformation, friction still defines many insurance interactions. Why does the industry continue to struggle here?
Why Insurance Experiences Still Lag Behind
Part of the explanation lies in how insurance experiences were created in the first place.
In many cases, what organizations call "digital products" are not truly designed experiences in the way, say, apps like Uber or Slack might be. They are more like digitized manual processes.
Over the past few decades, insurers have gradually translated manual workflows into software—policy administration, quoting, underwriting, claims management—often without fundamentally rethinking how those processes should work in a digital environment. New platforms, integrations, and features have been layered onto existing infrastructure over time, producing systems that reflect the history of the business rather than the needs of modern users.
Insurance also operates within an unusually complex ecosystem. Digital tools frequently need to support multiple audiences simultaneously: customers, agents, brokers, underwriters, customer service representatives, employers, benefits administrators, and third-party partners. Each group interacts with the same underlying systems but with different goals, responsibilities, and expectations.
When digital experiences are built within this environment without a clear design strategy, complexity has a tendency to surface directly in the interface. What should feel like a coherent system instead begins to resemble a collection of disconnected workflows and tools.
In practice, this friction tends to appear in a few clear ways.
Three Patterns of Friction
Across the insurance ecosystem—from consumer apps to broker portals to internal platforms—we frequently see friction emerge in three distinct forms.
These patterns are not necessarily the result of poor decisions or weak design teams. More often, they reflect structural realities within the industry itself. While understanding them doesn't fix anything, it does explain why so many digital experiences in insurance feel more difficult to use than they should—and can lead to design solutions that can resolve much of this friction.
Role friction
Insurance systems often serve a wide range of users at once. Customers may use the same platform that agents rely on for quoting or that underwriters use to evaluate submissions. In benefits ecosystems, carriers, employers, brokers, and employees may all interact with overlapping systems.
When experiences fail to account for these differences, it becomes difficult for people to understand what they are responsible for or what actions they are permitted to take. Workflows slow down, ownership becomes ambiguous, and teams begin to rely on manual coordination outside the system—emails, calls, spreadsheets—to move work forward.
Offering friction
A second type of friction emerges when products that are conceptually connected are delivered through disconnected experiences.
Insurance offerings often span multiple policies, services, or programs. A household may purchase auto, renters, and umbrella coverage from the same carrier. A broker may assemble a coverage package across several products. Employees may navigate benefits that combine insurance coverage with wellness programs or leave management services.
Although these offerings are experienced as part of a single relationship, they are frequently delivered through separate systems and workflows. From the user's perspective, what should feel like one cohesive service instead becomes a series of disconnected touchpoints.
Mission friction
A third type of friction arises when organizations themselves are not aligned on what a digital product is meant to accomplish. This is more common than you may think.
Insurance portals and applications often accumulate features over time as different teams add features to support their own goals—sales, servicing, compliance, reporting, relationship management. Without a clear shared vision and objective guiding the experience, these additions can gradually pull the product in competing directions.
For the people using these systems, the result is an experience that feels incoherent. Users may struggle to determine where to begin, which workflows are most relevant, or what the platform is ultimately designed to help them do.
Designing Through Complexity
The complexity that produces these forms of friction is not unique to any single insurer. It is a product of the industry itself. Insurance ecosystems involve multiple stakeholders, layered products, regulatory constraints, and long-standing organizational structures.
Because of this, the goal should not necessarily be to eliminate friction altogether. In many cases, some friction is necessary. Verification steps, disclosures, and safeguards often exist to protect customers and ensure that risk decisions are made responsibly.
The challenge is distinguishing between the kinds of friction that add value to users and the kinds that simply make systems harder to use.
Human-centered design plays an important role here because it shifts the starting point for digital experiences. Rather than organizing systems around internal structures or historical processes, it begins with the people who rely on those systems every day and the tasks they are trying to accomplish.
When digital products are designed with that perspective in mind, complexity does not disappear—but it can be absorbed and structured in ways that make the experience feel far more usable.
Looking More Closely at Friction in Insurance
In a recent report, we at Cake & Arrow took a deeper look at how these patterns of friction show up across B2C, B2B, and B2B2C insurance experiences. The report explores why these dynamics persist, how they shape day-to-day interactions with insurance systems, and how design teams can begin addressing them in practical ways.
The industry will likely never achieve completely frictionless experiences—and there are good reasons for this. But understanding where friction comes from is critical to designing syst
For a deeper exploration of these ideas and practical design solutions for reducing friction in digital insurance experiences, download our full report, Tackling Friction in Insurance Through Design.
