In the modern insurance market, the “digital handshake” has pretty much replaced the face-to-face meeting. Whether you’re a broker or an underwriter, your online application form is often the first, and most critical, interaction a client has with your brand.
But let’s be real: most insurance forms are still designed for the insurer’s convenience, not the customer’s. They’re often long, clunky, and honestly, a bit of a pain to fill out.
According to the Baymard Institute, the average abandonment rate for online documents is sitting at nearly 70%. In our world, where the product is complex and the questions can feel a bit invasive, that number can climb even higher.
Is your quote-to-bind workflow actually helping you write more business, or is it just another hurdle stopping your clients from finishing their application? Let’s run through a few golden rules of modern UX to see where you stand.
The old way of doing things was to hoard every scrap of data before showing a price at the very end. In the digital age, that’s a fast track to high bounce rates.
At uBind, we’re big believers in the Live Price. By using sensible defaults, like assuming standard loadings based on your specific target market, you can give a customer an estimate within seconds. It makes the whole process feel more like an interactive experience rather than a digital interrogation.
Try this: Go to your own form. Can a customer see a price change in real-time as they toggle options? If they’re waiting until page five to see a dollar sign, you’ve probably already lost them.
Every extra field you ask for is another reason for a customer to walk away. It sounds simple, but the impact is massive. A famous Expedia case study showed that removing just one “optional” field (Company Name) led to an extra $12 million in profit in a single year.
Take a look: Is every field on your form truly essential? If a field is optional, you can almost always remove it altogether. Research by Marketo found that including just a few non-essential fields can inflate the cost per lead by as much as 25%. If you aren’t using the data for underwriting or compliance right now, don’t ask for it. Every question is a potential exit point for your client.
Dropdown menus are often where conversions go to die. They require more clicks, hide the available options, and are a nightmare on mobile. Research by CXL suggests that radio buttons (where everything is visible at once) are much faster for our brains to process.
The Fix: Are you using dropdowns for “Yes/No” questions? Swap them for selectable icons. We process images way faster than text, and reducing that “cognitive load” makes the whole thing feel effortless.
Psychologically, we’re wired to finish what we start. Dr. Robert Cialdini’s Principle of Commitment shows that once we take even a tiny step toward a goal, we feel a lot more pressure to see it through.
The Strategy: Don’t lead with the “heavy” stuff like the duty of disclosure, complex claims history, or bank details. Put the engaging questions first, such as selecting their industry via icons or choosing the specific coverage types they want to see. Get them “pot committed” with these low-friction choices before you dive into the technical underwriting questions.
People want to know they won’t be filling out a form forever. Breaking a form into clear steps builds trust. Furthermore, aiming for a “Default Valid” state, where options are pre-selected based on the most common user profile, significantly lowers friction. As noted in Askable’s 2025 Design Principles, forms that pre-fill or pre-select common options see a 35% higher completion rate.
The check: Does your form show a progress bar or clearly laid out steps? More importantly, keep an eye on your transition speeds. If the screen changes too instantly, users might miss that they’ve moved forward. A 2025 UX Movement report found that subtle animated transitions help users maintain context and reduce “change blindness.”
Most insurance forms are designed on big office monitors, but your customers are probably filling them out with their thumbs while waiting for a coffee. If your buttons are too small or your error messages are vague, they’ll just quit.
A few things to check:
At the end of the day, good UX isn’t about making things look “pretty”: it’s about respect. It’s respecting your customer’s time and making the often-dry world of insurance feel a bit more human.
If your current form feels like a chore, it’s probably costing you business. A few tweaks to the logic and layout could be the difference between a new policy and a “closed tab.”
Want to see what a high-conversion form actually looks like? Check out the uBind platform and see how we’re making insurance applications actually usable.
uBind is the future of insurance technology. Our innovative platform provides the technology to distribute insurance and sell at scale, with the tools to manage, refine and optimise your insurance operations.