Ideation and design to make selecting a health plan easier
The problem:
The “Select a Plan” experience in a public sector health insurance enrollment application was preventing users from efficiently searching and finding new health plans.
The application was quickly modified from an off-the-shelf product in a year’s time to accommodate the extensive rules and regulations of the federal government. This resulted in quick-decision making at the expense of the user experience.
During the open enrollment season, call centers reported enrollees had trouble finding plans, though they couldn’t provide specifics. These were not technical assistance calls.
My plan:
I typically work through the steps of a Design Thinking workflow, coordinating with partners and leading working sessions as-needed.
Understand
Ideate
Prototype
Test
To understand the issue, I decided to use a heuristic evaluation to review the experience in a cognitive walkthrough. Based on previous experience, I know this would provide me with enough information to find low-hanging fruit issues and give an indication if this was a serious problem for future usability testing.
According to analytics, most customers use a desktop / laptop so I focused there first and then reviewed the mobile design patterns to see if I saw the same issues.
Top issue #1
It’s difficult to see what can be accomplished because the font scaling is so large. Customers need to do a lot of scrolling up and down. To be fair, this issue was present throughout the entire experience but finding and selecting plans is one of the most interactive areas of the enrollment application.
Screen at 100% on a 25 inch monitor.
Screen shown at 33% on a 25 inch monitor.
Top issue #2
The analytics also showed customers were missing the “filter plans” area. In a logged in state, I noticed the filters were divided. To filter plans according to home or work address was t the top, and the rest of the filters were after the first health plan card. This card is the customer’s current health plan so the goal is to keep the current health plan accessible while viewing and comparing new plans.
Top issue #3 Hidden choices and user feedback
The filters are almost all hidden within a drop-down, which are known to cause usability issues. Drop-downs hide choices and it’s easy to miss so many choices when they are consolidated together.
The filters show a cost range, but they don’t reflect the actual minimums and maximums of plans in the sytem.
There is a provider dropdown. These providers are populated by a lookup on a previous screen. This is the only way a customer can choose to filter by their providers.
When filters are chosen, the display lets the user know the choices they’ve made in addition to all the filters they haven’t selected.
Ideation session with internal partners
Now that I understood some key interaction patterns and usability issues that were likely driving up call center numbers, I gathered the evidence and led a brainstorm and sketching session with two product owners and one customer service ecosystem manager. They represented the enrollment platform’s business priorities as well as understood customer needs.
I reviewed my notes with the group and we discussed how big of a potential problem this was with customers. The customer service partner relayed anecdotal evidence from customers and employees to support the findings.
We reviewed comparative experiences that we had access to at other healthcare exchanges and eCommerce sites.
We turned the problems into “How Might We..” questions for exploring solutions.
Design drafts
I combined everyone’s ideas with digital design best practices and produced three mockups. I reviewed them with the same core group. I recommended a few additional changes we didn’t discuss like updating the progress bar at the top of the page to be more accurate. We decided to prioritize the reorganization for and MVP, but anything that could be considered recommending plans to consumers would need to be approved by the legal department and executives. They would be follow-on features as they were approved.
Final design and documentation
Scaling the overall fonts down would be a global change so that was moved to the Jira backlog as its own story.
The filtering was consolidated in the left sidebar as a common eCommerce pattern most customers would be familiar with.
A current plan card and left filters stay sticky on the left sidebar as enrollees shop for new plans so they can make easy comparisons.
Totals were added to filters to prevent returning null results
Plan cards were updated to remove providers not covered. Showing names of covered providers with a number letting enrollees know (1-3 covered) would suffice with less space.
Orientation: the progress bar was updated with additional steps that were added just prior to open enrollment and they were renamed to be specific. They were too vague to be helpful before.
The pagination pattern was updated to make it easier to use on mobile devices and give enrollees more control over how many benefits plans they could see at once.
Language was clarified:
“Address filter” was changed to “Your location”
Under the Pharmacy category, “Edit” was clarified to “Edit drug list on Pharmacy page” so enrollees knew they would be leaving the shopping page if they selected it
“Service area” was changed to “Coverage area” to be consistent
A search page with filters on the left for a health insurance enrollment application.
