Sympany — The Art of Simplicity

Sympany is an insurance company that has been committed to helping private individuals and companies for more than 100 years. It offers both health insurance and accident insurance as well as property and liability insurance. Its head office is in Basel, Switzerland.

The history of Sympany and its predecessor ÖKK, founded in Basel 100 years ago, has been an eventful one, marked by change, dynamism and challenges, by tradition and by innovation. Thanks to the loyalty of the people of Basel and policyholders, it is also a story of success: what once was the public health insurance provider for Basel is now a private national insurance company.

The main challenge was to unify the whole website to our client’s vision. Since the project did not involve an all around new website, we had to work closely with their design team to incorporate their design visions into our solutions.

As Sympany wanted to softly redesign its digital brand experience, Parkside had the chance to create a facelift of the corporate website and to envision a set of design ideas and interactive features. The goal was to modernize and brighten up their features on their website, as well as to make it more accessible for its users.

We tackled the project in two phases starting with a discovery phase to identify and understand the customer needs and key requirements, followed by an ideation phase to prototype the design vision and empower the team to implement the vision.
Sympany’s components were stripped of their unnecessary functions and reduced to their core purpose, which made them more distinct and effective in their use. This “less is more” approach created quickly understandable components for the website, making the exploration more accessible and straightforward.

In order to simplify the use of their website, we decided to introduce them to a chatbot – a conversational experience with AI. The design of our chatbot was kept simple yet versatile. By incorporating the colors of Sympany, the chatbot received a distinctive design, which was unmistakable in its company’s fashion. Another feature is the different looks of the chatbot depending on the season or topical campaign. This enables Sympany to choose between diverse demeanor, making the usage fun and entertaining for its visitors.

The new elements on the website aim to emphasize a simplified user experience and unify the whole website. We aimed to create simplified navigation on the website, that was easy to use and yet very sleek in appearance.

There is also no more need for users to navigate through the whole website to find the right content or service thanks to our newly designed human-centered conversational experience that empowers users to interact with Sympany directly and is fully integrated with existing processes and customer support systems.