Persona 01
The retail broker.
Adam Campbell, 43, lives in Outlook and Excel. Wants less manual data entry and more time to advise clients.
Client-facing
Deadline-driven
Speed-first
Arqu
Our redesign turned Arqu's dense specialty-insurance MVP into flows that scored 2.5 or higher out of 3 on efficiency in user testing, then handed off a design system and a marketing site built for the company's raise.
Insurance
·
Web app · Website
·
UI/UX Design & Website Redesign
At a glance
Discovery, three tested sprints, one system.
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TEAM
3-person
Founding Team
RESEARCH
6 experts
Plus 8 test sessions
OUTPUT
Web app + site
Redesign, system, site
TIMELINE
12 weeks
Dec 2021 – Mar 2022
The Client
A technology-led brokerage rebuilding how specialty insurance gets placed.
Arqu is a tech-enabled wholesale insurance brokerage working in the specialty, excess and surplus market, a corner of insurance defined by complex risks, low transparency, and too many middlemen. When Wandr came on, Arqu was an early-stage team pivoting from a SaaS tool to a brokerage model, with an MVP in hand.
Its vision was to make complex risk placement collaborative and efficient for every stakeholder: retail brokers, wholesale brokers, and carriers. The functionality was real. The experience had not caught up to the complexity underneath it, and the team needed it market-ready on a tight timeline.
Seed-stage
Pre-Series A at the time
$100B+
Excess and surplus lines
$10M
Series A raised, 2024
The Challenge
A powerful product few first-time users could navigate.
Arqu had built genuine functionality for a hard industry. In testing, the same pattern surfaced again and again: the people it was built for could get lost the first time through.
Problem 01
Built-in complexity overwhelmed new users.
Specialty risk placement is dense by nature, spanning programs, submissions, and deals. The MVP exposed that complexity directly, and first-time users found it intimidating before they found it powerful.
Problem 02
The benchmark was a spreadsheet.
The target users lived in Excel and Outlook. A new platform had to map to habits an industry with famously low tech adoption already trusted, or it would not earn a place in the workflow.
Problem 03
Designing against a moving product.
Engineering was still building as design ran. The redesign had to ship into a moving target and move Arqu toward first revenue, without waiting for the product to stand still.
Before / After
Same hard industry, rebuilt for the moment of the deal.
The clearest shift was in Submissions. The MVP asked brokers to start from a blank message; the redesign led with prefilled, program-aware drafting, so the tool matched what brokers actually do instead of imitating an inbox.
Before
After WANDR
Our Role
From redesign to Research-backed foundation.
01
Product strategy and a UX audit of the existing MVP
02
Discovery research with six specialty-insurance professionals
03
A proto-persona and jobs-to-be-done built from the research
04
Information architecture rebuilt around real user mental models
05
UX/UI design across the Programs, Submissions, and Home & Deals flows
06
Moderated user testing on each flow, feeding rapid iteration
07
A reusable design system delivered at handoff
08
A marketing website to support fundraising and go-to-market
Research
Before any pixel moved, we learned the industry.
Arqu recruited the people who live in this market. We interviewed six in discovery, then kept testing with brokers through every sprint, so the redesign started from their reality rather than our assumptions.
01
Discovery interviews
Everyone named the same enemies.
Across two retail brokers, two wholesale brokers, and two carrier-side leaders, the same pains surfaced: manual data entry, too many middlemen, and no transparency. “Everyone is overworked because they are all doing manual data entry.”
02
Efficiency in testing
The redesigned flows tested well
In moderated testing, the Programs sub-flows scored 2.5 or higher out of 3 on efficiency. Users singled out the side-by-side bind scenarios: “simple, and all presented graphically in an easy way. Just pick the option and that’s it.”
03
The benchmark to beat
The bar wasn't a rival product. It was a spreadsheet.
Every user confirmed the platform was unlike anything they’d used, and better than the tool they default to. “We use Excel, and this is a lot more intuitive than that.”
One product, three sides of every deal.
Persona 02
The wholesale broker.
The market-maker in the middle, juggling programs, submissions, and carriers at once. Every manual step is time taken from placing business.
Programs
Submissions
Manual-heavy
Persona 03
The carrier.
Underwriting the risk. Wants clean, well-packaged submissions and transparency into why a deal was won or lost.
Wants proof
Better inputs
Faster decisions
Design the complexity down, don't hide it.
01
Model.
Meet existing mental models. Users came from Excel and Outlook, so the redesign borrowed the structure and language they already trusted rather than inventing new patterns.
02
Sequence.
Order the work by impact. We started where the value was highest, the Programs and Submissions flows, so the earliest design moved Arqu closest to first revenue.
03
Prove
Test every flow, then iterate. Each sprint ended in moderated user testing with brokers, so discoverability issues were caught and fixed before handoff, not after launch.
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Outcomes
What the work moved.
By the end of the engagement, Arqu had a research-backed redesign of its core flows, a reusable design system, and a marketing site built for the raise ahead.
01 · TESTING
2.5+/3
Efficiency across the tested flows
02 · EVIDENCE
6
Industry experts shaped the redesign
03 · SYSTEM
1
Design system delivered at handoff
04 · TRAJECTORY
$10M
Series A raised, 2024
Client Voice
In their words.
“
Today was the last day of our engagement and I wanted to thank you for putting together such an amazing team. We could not have asked for a better experience and outcome. We look for long-term partnerships, and we hope to engage again in the not-too-distant future.
Chi H Lee
Co-founder and CEO, Arqu
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