Why Insurance Claims Systems Create Friction and How Design Can Fix It
Wednesday, February 25th, 2026 Auto Insurance Industry Property Risk Management TechnologyA new design report, Tackling Friction in Insurance Through Design , outlines three persistent forms of friction inside insurance systems: role friction, offering friction, and mission friction. While the report centers on digital experience design, its findings map directly to everyday challenges in claims operations.
Role friction occurs when multiple users operate within the same system without clear boundaries, permissions, or accountability. In claims, this surfaces when adjusters, supervisors, agents, policyholders, and underwriting teams share overlapping access but lack clarity on ownership. The result is duplicated work, unclear authority, and delays driven by side-channel communication in email or chat. The report advocates for visible role definitions, shared workspaces, and clearer collaboration structures. For claims teams, that means fewer internal handoffs and better status transparency.
Offering friction stems from fragmented product and policy ecosystems. Policyholders may carry auto, property, umbrella, or specialty lines under one carrier, yet those policies often live in disconnected systems. For adjusters, this fragmentation complicates coverage review, limits visibility into bundled protections, and forces repetitive data entry. The report recommends unified ‘single pane of glass’ views and coverage visualization tools that show protection gaps and overlaps. Applied to claims, that approach could streamline coverage analysis and reduce errors in multi-policy losses.
Mission friction may be the most familiar to claims professionals. It arises when a platform attempts to serve competing internal goals such as sales, compliance, servicing, reporting, and cross-sell without a clear organizing purpose. Claims portals frequently bury urgent tasks beneath marketing flows or administrative layers. The report argues for anchoring systems around user intent and end-to-end workflows. For adjusters, this means dashboards organized by work state, clear task prioritization, and reduced cognitive load.
The report acknowledges that some friction in insurance is necessary due to regulatory safeguards and risk controls. The challenge is distinguishing between protective friction and operational drag. For claims organizations investing in modernization, the takeaway is practical: reducing system friction is less about adding features and more about clarifying roles, connecting products, and aligning platform purpose.
As carriers continue modernizing core systems and deploying AI-enabled claims tools, friction at the workflow level remains a critical operational risk. Adjusters who understand these structural issues will be better positioned to advocate for systems that support rather than slow their work.
