Overcoming Low UX Maturity to Design an Insurance Site

Overview

A leading regional medical insurer sought our assistance to revamp its existing Medicare plan shopping experience. Pain points in the current system were common in the industry: an education gap, cumbersome workflows, and disjointed systems. The client hoped that creating a new, personalized experience that is simple, tailored, and intuitive would help them stand out among industry peers.

As the sole design professional on the team, I owned the entire design workstream. I collaborated with a Project Manager, a Senior Strategist, and a Junior Strategist to evangelize design thinking with client stakeholders, set the design roadmap, plan and facilitate workshops, and craft UI/UX designs for the experience.

Challenges

Instilling Design Thinking

My team members primarily had backgrounds in business and strategy, resulting in a feature-led approach. Their main priorities were identifying missing features compared to competitors, T-shirt sizing features, and computing ROI to decide MVP requirements. There was little consideration for the overall user experience or in-depth research into the pain points.

The team attempted to work with the client to quantify loosely defined requirements in order to decide on the MVP scope.

Since I joined near the end of the research phase, I had to quickly take stock of the available information and educate the team on crucial gaps in design considerations, such as design principles, personas, user stories, branding, and device requirements. Once the team understood the importance of these elements, they worked with me to obtain existing materials from the client's experience team. For elements requiring stakeholder input, we incorporated them into design workshops as part of the explanations behind design choices and gathered feedback at that time.

Navigating Evolving Requirements

When I joined the team with around four weeks left on the project timeline, the MVP design requirements had not yet been finalized. I immediately emphasized the risk this posed to our design progress and took the initiative to draft a design sprint roadmap. I then worked with the team to use this roadmap to nudge the client toward agreeing on a rough scope of design.

Even with the roadmap signed off, there were still issues with scope creep and a lack of detailed requirements. The initial plan covered about seven desktop screen designs, but as time went on, different screen states and some mobile layout examples were also requested. On the requirement side, many had only a title and generic description. There were no user stories to help us understand the users' goals and motivations.

To overcome this, I first leaned on internal subject matter experts to help interpret the requirements and gain their perspective on what's crucial for the user. I then prioritized high-impact moments, such as the Plan Comparison screen, to focus my efforts on reimagining the experience. For other screens, I utilized standard design patterns in the industry with slight UX improvements to save time. In workshops, I made sure to articulate my design rationale, backing it with real-world references whenever possible, and highlighted how feedback was addressed. The client was very receptive to this approach, delighted by some unexpected features and trusted the design choices, which reduced the number of iteration requests

Collaborating with team and client on a Miro board. Clear explanations of screen interactions and real-world references are shown. Additional voice-over explanations on design rationales are included during workshops. MVP features are also mapped on the board to illustrate how requirements are reflected in the UI.

The current state overwhelms users with an excessive amount of information without considering relevance. The layout makes it difficult for users to visually compare plan features, requiring them to scroll up and down while trying to remember metrics for each plan.

The future state allows users to customize displayed plan features based on their preferences. A more compact, structured layout with visual cues helps users easily compare multiple plans at once.

The current state asks an overwhelming amount of questions, which users may not understand due to lack of industry knowledge. The UI fails to indicate where the user is in the overall plan shopping process and how to navigate to view the plans.

The future state begins with user needs as a starting point and searches for fitting plans. The screen also offers tailored tips to help users understand key considerations at each step. A standard wizard UI pattern is implemented to reduce the learning curve and orient the user on their progress within the overall flow.

Outcome

In total, we delivered 33 mockups illustrating the end-to-end flow of the Medicare shopping experience. These designs covered 7 screens and various screen states, along with examples of mobile layouts. The client was delighted with the result, noting that the new experience visibly reduced complexity and the learning curve while providing the flexibility and educational support needed for users to quickly customize it to their needs.