Design Vision for an Insurance company

Simplifying the process of Employees accessing their self-service portal to know about their coverages, claims, and benefits.

 

My Role

I led the design decision-making based on the client workshops and research insights to create a consistent product design within the team. Additionally, I co-design workshops with target users, did research synthesis, and produced viable design ideas.

Team

Marlaine Erhart, User Researcher
Emmy Fa, User Researcher
Alexandra Stampfl, Project Manager

 
 

Client

US largest
healthcare insurance firm

Duration

16 weeks

Tools

Adobe XD
Miro
Invision

 
 

Challenge prompt
from our client

“Create a north star visual experience that illustrates to leadership the potential of the Group Employee portal experience and what benefits it can bring to the organization if implemented?”

Illustration by Katerina Limpitsouni

Process

Developed our product through the following phases:
Define, Discover, Design, and Deliver

 

01. Define

  • Context

  • Goal

  • Hypothesis

 

Context

Group Employee customers of the largest insurance company need a way to quickly and easily understand their coverage as well as file and track claims because they will be transitioning from a direct relationship with their employer to a direct relationship with an Insurance firm.

 
 
 

Goal

Serve as the primary means for Group Employee customers to learn about, use and make the most of their coverage, all with unexpected ease.

 
 

Hypothesis

We believe a customized, informative, and understandable MyBenefits portal will empower Employees to interact with their benefits products independently and maximize their value.

 
 

02. Discover

  • Research (Workshop)

  • Target user groups

  • Persona focus

  • Experience principles

 

USER RESEARCH

 

We reviewed insights from client design team workshops and research team to gain an understanding of the areas causing the most pain or friction in the current state.

 

Workshop Takeaways

 

Users don't understand the value of their products: Users forget exactly what they have after enrollment and need simple language to understand the value of their products.

A need for customization: Customers are accustomed to experiences that adapt to their needs, grow with their preferences and proactively anticipate their needs - The future Metlink experience should reflect that.

 

Research team Insights

 
 

System visibility issues: Buried information and hidden options

Long claims process: Short-term disability feels long and customers would prefer it to be shorted.

 

TARGET USER GROUPS

 

—User groups are organized around digital behaviors. Each group differentiates strongly demographically and on benefits behaviors and attitudes.

 
 
 
 

Identified the claims experience, specifically Disability claims for maternity leave as a critical experience proof point and a significant driver of pain.

 
 
 

PERSONA FOCUS

 

— Designed a journey for Valentina, our persona, as she files a maternity claim.

Why focus on Valentina as Persona?

 

Valentina is a tech-savvy 32-year old

Our persona, Valentina, is a likely early adopter of the future benefits platform.

 

She logs on when she has a major life event

She is now expecting to have a child, so we follow her while she files her maternity claim and tracks its status.

 

Why maternity claims?

 

They comprise 40% of all disability claims

Submitting and filling claims is the most important use case. Of those filing for disability, 40% of them are maternity claims.

 

Only 7% are submitted online

Claims are the #2 reason for calling the customer service call center. 90% of maternity claims are submitted offline and only 7% can complete the process online.

 
 
 

EXPERIENCE PRINCIPLES

 

— Then we mapped and designed a user journey for our persona Valentina while she accesses MyBenefits and files her maternity claim. We highlighted value streams, epics, and core features throughout the journey.

 
 
 

Once our team has mapped and designed a user journey for our persona Valentina, we did Features prioritization to manage priorities by highlighting with star emoji. Features and capabilities have been derived at each step using the happy path journey.

 

The Journey

 

Throughout our journey, we designed new innovative features around four core experience areas.

 
 

03. Design

  • Information Architecture

  • Ideation

  • Wireframing

INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE

  • Auditing the Current State: We created a site map laying out how the pages in the current experience are linked in labeled in order to assess the current site-architecture and page inventory.

 

Employee portal screen(Current state)

 

Site map(Current state)

We started reworking the IA considering user context (yellow) and core features (purple). We conducted an open card sort (amongst ourselves) sorting the stickies into piles that made sense and then labeling them.

These groups aren't necessarily global navigation categories and could exist on any level / area of the experience

 
 

After the open card sort, some key thoughts surfaced:

 

1. Dashboard as a central hub

The dashboard should be a visual display of the most important and timely information that links to everything else in the system.

 

2. Coverages & Profile

There were more differences here but we noticed those that were different were in profile. This opened a conversation about the overlapping functionality and giving the user the ability to learn about their coverage and update simultaneously.

 

3. Claims

There was a lot of overlap here. Claims seem to be a pretty siloed process. Thought it was interesting everyone placed documents in this area.

 

4. Find a Provider:

Nature of products might not need to find a provider so we were wondering how prominent it should be. For the audience that does need this feature, like dental, it is really important.

 
 

IDEATION

Before finalizing the new navigation, I sketched out a few possibilities to give more flexibility and optionality.

 

What did we hear from the client?

 

Why horizontal navigation over vertical navigation?

 

Fewer options in Navigation: Less top-level categories reduce difficulty choosing an option (high cognitive load). The dashboard acts as the primary navigation giving a glimpse of what the portal offers. This makes site categories catered and personalized to the user's needs.

 

Flexibility and customization:: Horizontal menus work better with less number of menu items. It gives the full width of the page as compared to vertical Navigation which allows more flexibility and customization on the page especially on smaller screens.

04. Deliver

  • Key features

  • Key learnings

 

KEY FEATURES

Throughout our journey we designed new innovative features around four core experience areas.

 
 
 

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KEY LEARNINGS

This was a really exciting and fun project for me to work on as it provides real value, and involved a ton of research, and detailed vision work. However, shifting priorities and changing roadmaps have resulted in tight deadlines. Still, I learned some important takeaways from this project related to product and business processes.

 
 

How to adapt to changing requirements?

New timelines, resourcing issues, and reprioritization meant the scope of the project was constantly changing. I had to adapt to those changes and still deliver the best design in time with tight deadlines.

 

Don’t overpromise and underdeliver

I learned how to prioritize and focus on a key persona while designing a product vision.

 

For more information on this project, contact me!

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