Unifying Two Product Lines Into One Application

The Challenge

The Hartford ran two separate line-of-business applications — Spectrum for Commercial (Auto, Home, Casualty) and a Personal Lines app (Auto, Home) — each supporting agents and actuaries through hundreds of different daily job types, of which rate quoting was only a small slice. Both ran on separate, aging on-premise infrastructure. Maintaining two divergent codebases and server environments was costly and inefficient, and each application had grown its own inconsistent, dated UI over time.

The goal: move both divisions onto a single cloud-native application to cut infrastructure and maintenance costs and improve performance — and use the consolidation as an opportunity to give agents and actuaries a more intuitive, unified interface.

OOUX: Mapping the Overlap

Research included user surveys, an early MVP, and close collaboration with product managers across six divisions company-wide to understand the broader landscape of product needs — though the consolidation itself was scoped to the two largest: Spectrum (Commercial: Auto, Home, Casualty) and Personal (Auto, Home), both under The Hartford. Using Object-Oriented UX methodology, I mapped both divisions' task flows onto a single combined diagram — surfacing shared objects (Jobs, Actions, File Management, Administration) that could be unified rather than duplicated. The backend job queue itself was already shared infrastructure serving all divisions company-wide; what needed unifying was the front-end experience of it.

The Redesigned Application

The new Hartford application combined both divisions under a single interface with a unified dashboard, smart form assistance, and customizable info cards. Three concept sketches were presented for quick buy-in from product owners before moving to high-fidelity.

• Unified dashboard with job summary donut chart and customizable widget cards
• Smart form help with contextual validation and pre-populated fields based on user history
• Role-based cards letting agents, actuaries, and admins each configure their own landing view

Job Queue: From Static Table to Real-Time Visibility

The legacy job tracker was a static table — agents submitted a job and then manually refreshed the page, sometimes for hours, to check whether it had completed. The redesigned view gives agents and actuaries real-time visibility into where a job stands — its status and an estimated time to completion — drawn from the same backend job queue used across the company's divisions.

What actually happens to a job while it's queued — and how long it takes — varies by submission type and isn't something the interface can see or control. An agent can view status; they can't run, rerun, or cancel a job from this screen.

Outcomes

Skills & Tools