Inspection & Claims Flow

Starting where the pain was: the support queue

I started by sitting with the claims and support team. I shadowed agents as they worked through open claims, read through a backlog of past disputes, and mapped where their time went. Most of it wasn’t spent judging claims. It was spent hunting for evidence: asking for photos, matching them to dates, and trying to work out what the RV looked like before the trip.

That reframed the problem. We didn’t need a better claims form. We needed both sides to create reliable evidence before anything went wrong.

Designing for a driveway, not a desk

Inspections happen outdoors, often in a hurry, with a guest eager to hit the road. Bright sunlight washes out screens, connectivity at campgrounds is patchy, and nobody wants a twenty-step form at pickup. I designed for those conditions:

• Offline-first capture. Photos are stored on the device and upload in the background when a connection returns, so a weak signal never blocks a trip.
• High contrast, large targets. Capture screens use oversized controls and strong contrast so they work one-handed in direct sunlight.
• Progress you can see. A checklist of required angles shows what’s done and what’s left, so the inspection always feels finite.

Making it mandatory without making it a chore

Requiring inspections was the decision that made the system work, and the one that worried the business most. Any extra step at pickup risks friction, and hosts and guests were used to doing things their own way. We aligned with legal and our insurance partners on what “required” meant: skipping an inspection doesn’t block a trip, but it changes what you can claim or dispute later. That consequence did the persuading for us.

We also rolled out gradually, starting with high-volume hosts who felt the claims pain most. Their feedback shaped the final checklist, and their adoption gave us proof before the full launch.

Prototyping in the real world

The silhouette overlay looked simple in Figma and was anything but on a phone camera. I worked closely with our mobile engineers on rough prototypes and tested them the only way that made sense: outside, around an actual RV, in different light, with people who had never seen the flow before. Several overlays were redrawn after those sessions because they didn’t match how people naturally hold a phone.

On the other side of the process, I designed the support agent’s view with the claims team. The side-by-side comparison of pickup and return photos started as their request; they knew exactly which evidence they needed to see first, and in what order.

Trust & safety and the PM helped define the rules around timelines and eligibility, and we wrote the in-app explanations together so the policy read as fair rather than punitive.

What I’d do next

The obvious next step is putting the photo history to work. With consistent, angle-matched images on every trip, the system could flag likely new damage automatically and pre-fill a claim, turning a three-day resolution into something much closer to same-day.