behavioural research
Behavioural Research for Life Insurance Applications
Life insurance application journeys are long, emotionally loaded, and full of moments where users abandon or make errors. OpenScouter runs remote behavioural research sessions with neurodivergent participants to surface the friction points your analytics cannot explain.
Why Life Insurance Applications Lose Customers Before Completion
The FCA's Consumer Duty, introduced under PS22/9, requires firms to demonstrate that products and services deliver good outcomes for all customers, including those in vulnerable circumstances. For life insurance providers, that obligation extends directly to the digital application journey: the question sets, the disclosure screens, the medical history forms, and the payment confirmation steps that sit between a customer's intent and a completed policy.
Application drop-off in life insurance is rarely caused by price alone. Users encounter unfamiliar terminology around underwriting, benefit periods, and exclusion clauses. They face long multi-page forms with no visible progress indicators. They reach medical declaration screens and freeze, unsure whether to answer for themselves or a joint applicant. These are behavioural failures, and they are invisible in session recordings unless you know what to look for.
Standard analytics tell you where users leave. They do not tell you why a 58-year-old with dyslexia stopped at the critical illness rider selection screen, or why a user with ADHD rage-clicked the back button three times on the beneficiary nomination page. Behavioural research with the right participant panel gives you that explanation, in their own words, correlated with what their face and cursor were doing at the same moment.
FCA defines a vulnerable customer as someone who, due to their personal circumstances, is especially susceptible to harm, particularly when a firm is not acting with appropriate levels of care
Life insurance is one of the financial product categories where the FCA's definition of vulnerability carries the most weight in practice. Applicants are frequently making decisions during bereavement, serious illness, or significant life transitions. The FCA's 2021 finalised guidance FG21/1 makes clear that vulnerability is not a fixed characteristic but a circumstance, and that firms bear responsibility for the quality of care they extend during those circumstances. For a digital application journey, that means the design of every screen, every question, and every disclosure moment is a point of potential harm or appropriate care. Behavioural research is the method that produces direct evidence of which moments are failing which users, and why, in a format that connects to the firm's broader Consumer Duty documentation.
Our approach
Recruit participants who reflect your actual risk population
Life insurance applicants skew older, include people managing chronic conditions, and frequently include individuals under financial or emotional stress. Our neurodivergent panel surfaces usability failures that neurotypical testers in controlled lab conditions never encounter. They are a higher-signal panel, not a specialist edge case.
Capture three behavioural streams across the full application journey
Every session records interaction signals including clicks, scrolls, and rage clicks, voice think-aloud commentary, and facial expression processed locally on the participant's device. We run participants through your live or staging application from the quote entry screen through to policy confirmation, capturing the moments of hesitation, confusion, and abandonment as they happen.
Deliver human-confirmed reports your compliance and design teams can use
Our AI pipeline correlates the three data streams and identifies patterns across sessions. A human researcher reviews every finding before it reaches you. Reports are structured around specific journey steps, not generic usability principles, so your team knows exactly which screen, which field, and which interaction to address first.
What you receive
- Session recordings with timestamped annotations across all three behavioural streams
- Journey-step friction map covering quote, medical declaration, rider selection, beneficiary nomination, and payment confirmation
- Participant voice transcripts linked to corresponding interaction and expression data
- Prioritised findings report reviewed and confirmed by a human researcher before delivery
- A written summary suitable for sharing with compliance, product, and design stakeholders
Frequently asked
- How many participants do you recruit for a life insurance study?
- A standard OpenScouter engagement runs between six and twelve participants. That range is sufficient to identify recurring behavioural patterns across a structured application journey. We can discuss panel composition, including age range, cognitive profile, and prior experience with financial products, during scoping.
- Do you test on live applications or prototypes?
- We can test either. For life insurance, many clients prefer to run sessions on a staging environment with test policy data, particularly where the medical declaration screens involve real health information. We work with whatever environment your team can safely provide.
- How does this relate to our FCA Consumer Duty obligations?
- Consumer Duty under PS22/9 requires firms to evidence that their customer journeys deliver good outcomes. Behavioural research sessions produce documented evidence of where your application journey causes confusion or harm, particularly for customers in vulnerable circumstances. Our reports are evidence of your research process, not legal opinion, and should sit alongside your existing compliance documentation.
- What makes neurodivergent participants more useful for testing insurance journeys?
- People with ADHD, dyslexia, autism, and related cognitive differences interact with complex forms in ways that expose structural weaknesses in layout, language, and flow. An insurance application with dense legal language, conditional question logic, and multi-step declarations is exactly the kind of journey where these participants find issues that neurotypical testers miss entirely.
- How long does a study take from brief to report?
- From a confirmed brief to a delivered report typically takes between one and three weeks, depending on participant recruitment and the complexity of the journey being tested. We will give you a specific timeline during scoping. We do not run studies on an open-ended basis.
Keep reading
Talk to a behavioural researcher
Tell us about the vertical, the journey, and the evidence you need. We will scope a pilot in days, not weeks.