Newsboard for AIA, part 1: the pitch and the board

10 Sep 2015Projects6 min read

Newsboard is live inside iMO, the iPad app AIA Malaysia's Life Planners work from. Part 1 is what we pitched for iMO, and the board we ended up doing.

Newsboard is live. It’s the news section of iMO, the iPad app AIA Malaysia’s Life Planners use for their work, and it’s ours. AIA has had its planners on iPads since 2013, when it rolled out iPoS for signing up customers and started giving new recruits one.

I’m writing it up in two parts. This one is the design … what we pitched for iMO and the board we ended up doing, and part 2 is how we built it and the admin AIA uses to run it.

The pitch

iMO is an app with lots of modules. Late last year we pitched a few things for it, mostly about modernising the design, and that meant a lot of screens.

An iPad on a café table showing the iMO home screen: a Life Planner's photo and name, Stephanie Tan, over five red icons for Sales, Recruitment, Servicing, Learning and Information — The iMO home screen we pitched.

We tried the home screen a few ways, with the sales presenter up front, or a planner’s photo over five big icons for Sales, Recruitment, Servicing, Learning and Information, big so they’re easy to tap. Everything else came off two menus. A More button at the top has the calendar, the task manager and circulars & memos, with a badge on anything unread, and the hamburger menu has the rest.

Four iMO screens: the home screen on red, the More popover with Calendar, Task Manager, Circulars & Memos and ALPP, the hamburger menu listing Sales, Recruitment, Servicing and Learning items, and the Sales screen with Presenter, Product Resource Center, Financial Planner Calculator and iPoS — The home screen on red, the More popover, the hamburger menu, and Sales.

The sales presenter is a set of presentation materials with a card for each plan, and Products & Services has every plan by category, conventional or takaful, each with its video, brochure and infographics. A planner can share any of those to Facebook, Twitter or email.

Four iMO screens: the Sales Presenter with cards for A-Plus Venus, A-Life SuperJunior and A-Plus CriticalCare, Products & Services listing A-LifeLink and other plans under Life Protection, the same screen with a Conventional and Takaful switch, and a dark overlay for sharing the A-LifeLink video to Facebook, Twitter or email — The sales presenter, products, and sharing.

For the address book and the calendar we kept close to Apple’s own Contacts and Calendar, so the planners already know how they work. Imported contacts show up in pink. From a contact you can schedule an activity, send a message or send an email, and a customer’s birthday on the calendar comes with a button to send an e-card.

Four iMO screens: an address book with a contact card for Miss Melissa Boon and buttons for Sync Contact, Schedule Activity, Send Message and Send Email, a New Activity form with a date picker, a November 2014 month view with birthdays and Send e-card buttons, and a week view with appointments — The address book and calendar.

Lead management is a search over a planner’s customers … by location, age, the policies they have, their last purchase, their total premium and their life stage. Open a customer to see their policies side by side, or pick a few and import them into the address book.

Four Lead Management System screens: search criteria with no matches found, five search results, a customer called Chong Bee Bee with two policies compared side by side, and three customers selected for import — Lead management.

And for information there’s About AIA with the company’s history, AIA Touching Lives, a media centre for press releases, and Important Updates for letters from the CEO’s desk and the like.

Four iMO screens: About AIA with a timeline of AIA Malaysia's history from 1948, AIA Touching Lives with a story about a new school sidewalk, the Media Centre with press releases, and Important Updates with a Letters for the Future letter — About AIA, the media centre and Important Updates.

In the end we did one module, Newsboard. It was disappointing, but we take any wins.

The board

Newsboard is nine tiles. The big one is a carousel of featured articles that moves on by itself every few seconds, and the other eight are categories … Product, Takaful, Branding & Marketing, iMO, AIA Touching Lives, Industry News, Events and Photo Wall. Each category tile shows its newest article with the date, and anything that’s come in since you last opened Newsboard gets a “new” label.

The Newsboard design on an iPad: a large Agency News tile with a man playing guitar, and eight smaller tiles for Product, Takaful, Branding & Marketing, iMO, AIA Touching Lives, Industry News, Events and Photo Wall, each with a headline and a date in red — The board.

Tap a tile and you get that category, with the article on the right. You can share an article by email, if AIA allows it for that one. The full list of categories is in a popover at the top.

An article.

The board dimmed behind a popover listing the categories: Agency News, Industry News, Product, Corporate Solutions, Distribution Technology, Takaful, Branding & Marketing, AIA Touching Lives, Spurs News, AIA Vitality, Events and Photo Wall — All the categories.

After the first round AIA asked for an archive, and we gave them two ways to do it … older articles coming from the CMS like everything else, or each article as a PDF you download first. They went with the CMS.

The PDF option for the archive: a list of Agency News articles, each with a date and a download icon — The archive as PDFs to download.

The archive using content from the CMS: a list of Agency News articles on the left with the first one selected in green, and the article on the right — The archive from the CMS, the one AIA picked.