CLIENT: BCBSMA
Role: Enterprise Director of UX, UI, and Accessibility | Team Lead
Launched a redesigned and CMS-compliant Medicare shopping website that resulted in boosted engagement, improved CSAT scores, and increased plan enrollment YOY.
THE CHALLENGE
Keeping-up with evolving CMS guidelines and declining consumer feedback was unsustainable given the enterprise current framework for cross-partner collaboration between business and technology. Declining plan enrollment stats forced the enterprise to re-evaluate the website and other channels that support Medicare shopping and plan enrollment.
Siloed teams
The enterprise’s Medicare business, technology delivery, and consumer experience teams worked in siloes to support overall Medicare success. Lapses in communication and inefficient timeline estimates from the start caused difficulty delivering OKRs.
De-prioritizing consumer feedback
Users faced several challenges with the experience including difficulty with site navigation and understanding the plan info provided; therefore many abandoned the shopping experience before enrolling.
De-prioritizing Medicare as a business unit
Due to higher competition in the market, Blue Cross MA (the business) was seeking a web redesign to increase the number of plan enrollments during AEP to maintain and/or increase market share. For years, the Medicare business was heavily impacted by limitations such as internal legacy systems and back-end services, shortened timeline (less than 10 months), vendor and third-party feature limitations.
The Results
Collaborative teams of Cross-Functional SMEs
The cross-functional pod’s workflow catalyzed a philosophy of partnering design, technology, and business experts across every stage of a project, from research to iterative designs to agile delivery in the enterprise.
Consumers came first
It also enabled human capital cost-savings, a more cohesive user experience at the right time, the right place, and the right channel as tested with actual users.
Medicare business unit prioritized year-round
By supporting both user enhancements and maintaining a consistent and reliable shopping experience, the enterprise enabled human capital cost-savings with dedicated resources to support every stage of the product lifecycle from ideation through a consumer-rich feedback loop.
Scroll for Project & Process Details…
Details include Goals & OKRs, planning and task execution at every stage, and the user engagement stats from the first month post-launch.
Goals & OKRs
Increase Medicare member enrollment
Implement human-centered design framework to inform product and feature enhancements
Redesign the web shopping experience in the new brand
Improve the overall satisfaction of the experience by implementing key features and breaking down knowledge barriers for users
Build cross-functional dream team for more efficient digital experience development
The Process
Overview of the workflow for 8 cross-functional teams and over 50 stakeholders
Hypothesis
How might we improve the overall satisfaction of the Medicare web shopping experience to increase member enrollment?
User research
Shoppers were overwhelmed by the amount of information on the website and couldn’t understand the plan details
Shoppers were easily distracted and lost trying to navigate the overly complex website
Shoppers were not confident in their plan selections nor the costs to maintain their current medications and/or care team
Competitor analysis
United Health guided users through the complexities of Medicare with a simplified site architecture and omnipresent menu, clean interface and visuals, language that was common and divided into bite-sized chunks, navigation devices per page, and one-click to support or chat capabilities for support 24/7.
Tufts guided users through the complexities of Medicare with a simplified site architecture and omnipresent menu, clean interface and visuals, language that was common and divided into bite-sized chunks, navigation devices per page, and one-click to support or chat capabilities for support 24/7.
Blue Cross CA guided users through the complexities of Medicare with a simplified site architecture and omnipresent menu, clean interface and visuals, language that was common and divided into bite-sized chunks, navigation devices per page, and one-click to support or chat capabilities for support 24/7.
Screenshots of user research / competitor analysis
Design PROCESS
Key moments from the design process (content audits of current state, moscow analysis, wireframe & concept development, challenges faced with technical limitations, feedback and user testing insights, and final visual design)
Plan Listing
Results
Results from the first month of user engagement to the new Medicare website for shopping and enrolling in plans. All numbers were an increase from the previous year’s traffic.
Learnings
Reflecting on my work and the overall team operations to leverage insights into future projects.
Projects benefit from a single source of truth for documentation for everything from user research to development processes. When everyone had a shared knowledge space, the opinions of business could not outweigh the insights and results from user testing.
Time and stakeholder management is key. Ensure a single decision-maker for product-level decisions. With over 50 stakeholders at project kickoff, the ‘fair equity of responsibility’ for every component, feature, and epic caused massive delays to gather folks for presentations and sign-offs.
Agile development is a great framework for increasing speed-to-market, but the framework is not often successful when the business is not also trained in how to chunk up work. Antiquated processes in the business caused a waterfall framework that was unable to support rapid agile during design and development.
Utilizing in-depth consumer & market research to prioritize the product backlog decreased ‘spin’ and enabled faster feature development.