Invented好彩 Ho Choi is not a real insurer, and every plan,
price and limit on this page is made up. 好彩 is everyday Cantonese for luckily — an odd thing to
call a company you buy because luck is not enough. Nothing here is insurance advice.
Show every app
Four goals, four layouts
You are on day 3 of a week in Japan, insured on Ho Choi’s Classic plan. Pick a goal, then do it
in each of the four apps. Tap an app and the other three frost over, so there is one goal
on one screen; tap a frosted app to move to it.The bench below holds still while you use
it: pick a layout from A to D, do the goal, then try the next. The emergency comes first because it is the one that
cannot wait.
What you are timing is you, once. Each clock starts at your
first tap in that app and stops when the goal is done. Nothing leaves this page.
What each layout costs, measured
Read off each app’s screens in the language, view and density chosen above — switch them and the
numbers change. Tap counts are the shortest path from the home screen to each goal, walked by a script.
The home screen
The plan screen
Dense or minimal?
Hong Kong's payment and super-apps put dozens of services on their home screens; most
Western insurance apps put a handful. Switch Density above and every home gains a row of shortcuts,
a notice strip and a promotion. Watch two numbers move against each other: taps go down, because
there are more ways in, and targets on screen go up, because there is more to read before you find
yours. Neither is wrong. Which one costs your reader less depends on whether they arrive knowing the app.
Preferences for visual complexity do vary between countries — and by age and education within them
(Reinecke and Gajos, 2014) — which is a reason to test, not a licence to stereotype.
The four layouts
Choosing a plan: the judgement
Show the whole choice when…
the plans differ on more than price, and the reader needs to see the trade between them;
a cheaper route exists through an add-on, and only a side-by-side view makes it visible;
the reader already knows what they need and wants to check, not be told.
Make the choice for them when…
the reader knows their trip but not the insurance words, and a question in plain language is easier than a table;
the answer depends on two facts the reader holds (skiing, how much medical) that no layout can ask for;
you show the alternatives and say plainly why you recommended this one — or the recommendation is just a nudge.
What the insurer has to show
The exclusions, the policy wording and a declaration appear in every app before you buy, marked
required. A layout may move them or merge them into another step; it may
not remove them. The Hong Kong rules behind them have not yet been checked against the Insurance
Authority's own guidance. Until they are, read this as a design convention, not a statement of the law.
What this cannot tell you
One reader, once. The clocks show how a layout felt to you today, not how it performs; nothing is a study.
Learning carries over. The second app you try is easier because you have done the goal once — so the order you try them in is part of the result.
The plans are invented and deliberately few. With forty plans from twelve insurers the table stops fitting and the list starts winning.
Each goal has a right answer. Real choices often do not, and the adviser's advantage shrinks when nobody can say what "best" means.
The screen measures are of the first screen only. What happens after the first tap is in the tap counts, not the rest of the table.
A layout is a statement of whose priorities come first. This room builds one travel-insurance app four ways and asks you to do the same four jobs in each — call the emergency line, claim for a lost suitcase, check whether skiing is covered, buy cover for a ski trip — so that the cost of each layout's priorities is something you feel rather than something you are told.
No layout wins all four. The one that puts today's trip first reaches the emergency line in a single tap and takes the most taps to sell you anything; the shop window does the reverse. That is not a flaw to be fixed in either. It is the decision, made visible: which reader, in which moment, the layout is prepared to keep waiting.
AnatomyOne app laid out four ways — the shop window, the tile grid, the list and trip-first — each carried from its home screen through to its own way of choosing a plan: one plan at a time, a list, a comparison table, an adviser. Four goals run in every layout. Each layout has its own clock and tap counter, and the shortest path to every goal is walked by a script rather than asserted.
Put one job first when
One job cannot wait — an emergency, a lost card, a cancelled flight — and the reader arrives under stress, knowing what happened rather than where it is filed
The app knows the reader's situation (a trip under way, an account in arrears) and can say what matters today
You accept that every other job gets slower, and you measure by how much
Give every job equal weight when
The jobs are equally frequent and none is urgent, so ranking them would be a guess
The reader returns often and knows where things are — a grid they have learned beats a front page that changes
The alternative is a front page given to whichever department argued hardest; equal weight is at least honest about having no priority
States & accessEvery phone is built from real buttons, so the bench works from the keyboard: Tab reaches each app, and moving into a frosted app focuses it. Escape shows all four again. The frost is decoration only — a frosted app is covered by one labelled button (“Focus on B · The tile grid”) and is never hidden from a screen reader. Reduced motion removes the transition. On a phone the frost gives way to a stage that holds still under the header: tabs from A to D, one app on screen at a time in its own frame, each tab carrying its own clock — and a clock left running keeps running while you look at another app. The Chinese screens carry lang="zh-Hant-HK".
Specimens好彩 Ho Choi, an invented Hong Kong travel insurer, built four ways in English and Traditional Chinese. Every plan, price and limit is made up.
Principle at stakeHick–Hyman and visual hierarchy — fewer choices per screen, and the one that matters most made most visible — held against each other, because a layout can only put one thing first.
SourcesIyengar, S.S. and Lepper, M.R. (2000) 'When choice is demotivating', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), pp. 995–1006 · Scheibehenne, B., Greifeneder, R. and Todd, P.M. (2010) 'Can there ever be too many options? A meta-analytic review of choice overload', Journal of Consumer Research, 37(3), pp. 409–425 — which finds the average effect close to zero · Johnson, E.J. and Goldstein, D. (2003) 'Do defaults save lives?', Science, 302(5649), pp. 1338–1339 · Reinecke, K. and Gajos, K.Z. (2014) 'Quantifying visual preferences around the world', Proceedings of CHI 2014, pp. 11–20.
See alsoThe Wizard — buying cover is one, in every layout here.
Why traditional: That a layout trades one job's speed against the others' is long-standing practice with no single citable origin. The cited studies concern choice and visual complexity, not these four layouts, and the bench measures one reader, once.