Project
New Plan Comparison Tool Design Strategy
Services
Strategy, Product Design, Product Management
FROM THE PORTFOLIO OF:
Bradley Perkins
Product Strategist & Designer
Challenge
Identify and fix an outdated and poor performing healthcare plan comparison tool used by internal sales team members and businesses to find the best plan options for a companies employees
Project Scope:
- 2 month deadline
Deliverables:
- Design Strategy
- Wireframes
Discovery & Research
To initiate the project, the team first needed to identify the current business goals and user pain points that are occurring in the current digital experience. A remote workshop was held with members of the BSC team where we spent time listing and prioritizing business goals, business challenges, stakeholder and user interviews to uncover pain points, and agree on top opportunities to focus our attention on moving forward.
Key Business Challenges:
- Audience Segmentation (individual needs vs a brokers needs)
- Usability of the tool
- Ongoing plan changes to adapt to
Opportunities:
- Improve the selection and filtering to allow for more plan options without overwhelming the user will all the option
- Make the tool more sales friendly and a first step in the sales process
- Find a balance in showing the right amount of information to keep all internal stakeholders (User needs, vs Internal assumptions)
Next, the team conducted a simple UX audit and Tech assessment to understand opportunities and limitations that may be had with their current infrastructure, workflows, and integrated databases.
Afterwards, a second workshop was held to empathize with users and then create an ideal future state user flow for all, while taking into consideration current backend workflows and databases.
User Insights:
- Accustomed to easy to digest visual charts (yes/no features)
- Users dont like going beyond 4 products when comparing, becomes overwhelming
- Enjoy a level of social proof or understanding that people like them choose “this”
- General users struggle understanding health industry nomenclatures or abbriviations
- Plan selections highly influenced by price
- Users and Companies aim to predict upcoming year when making a selection (changing needs from previous years)
- Less informed users lean towards self guided processes
Ideation & Strategy
Due to the restrictions of the timeline, the team went straight into a design strategy to identify user behaviors that need to be considered in the design, inspiration research, a future state user flow, and prioritized MVP features and functions for a new and better user experience.
Key Tool Needs:
- Self Guided Process (simple questionnaire with context and help)
- Additional filtering logic for audience segmentation (individual, company, brokers)
- Location based filters
- Improved export and sharing functionality
Design
With this project scope relying on internal UI design and implementation, the last step in the project was to generate a web app information architecture and wireframes of the new experience to support an efficient design and development process.
The team presented options that included a more self guided approach to the plan comparison tool and an easier way to digest the mass amount of information involved in medical plan costs and differences. The designs also supported a more efficient integration structure for future additions to a number of BSC sites.
Final Results
The final wireframes were handed over to the internal BSC design team with some key changes to the original tool. The team introduced an audience path identification on the home page that allowed new and frequent users choose the path best for them. For newer users, a guided process was implemented to support making informed decisions to find the best product for them.
The team also shifted the layout to a selection between tile and list to give the user more control over the options. Lastly, a redesign of the comparison display was made to support a better information comprehension, but also export functionalities for both individuals and brokers.
