Health Insurance
Solving for a $1.3 trillion Usability Problem Impacting 150M Americans
Roles and Responsibilities
User research: user interviews, persona mapping, journey mapping, competitive analysis
Ux design: user flows, ideating solutions, sketches, wireframing.
Project Context
Fall 2023, Interaction and UX course final project.
Team: james thames, shweta dhingana, jasdeep Kaur, jaye Xaymongkhonh, johnna harrison, gianna guerra
Tools
Figma
Mural
Miro
This project was part of my core courses at KU, in Interaction design course, students were divided into 2 teams to work on a given problem and produce a genuine solution for users
We were asked to study the health insurance companies and find a gap among these all which creates challenges for users. Mainly we focus on united healthcare, Blue cross Blue shield, and Kaiser Permanente
Problem:
Health insurance complexity causes dissatisfaction and confusion among U.S. adults. Most of them struggle with understanding coverage details, costs, benefits, qualifications, terminology, and provider networks (KFF, 2003). This confusion, coupled with unclear regulations, contributes to consumer anxiety, hampers healthcare marketplace functioning, and may lead to financial problems and adverse health outcomes. Consumers often lack awareness of where to seek assistance and have limited understanding of their rights to appeal insurer decisions.
Approach:
Research:
To understand the problem deeply, we divided the research into primary and secondary research. In the primary research, we tried to understand the different health insurance issues with fellow class mates, by reading articles and by discussing it with some employees who works in health insurance organizations
In the secondary research, conducted 19 Quantitative interviews of stakeholders, identified users pains, challenges, and needs and then, synthesized that data into affinity map that helped in making personas. we were asked to visit health insurance providers website and observe which information they are providing to educate their customers.
United healthcare website covers some description of basic terms of health insurance, but it involves complex terminologies, unclear communication that confuses average customer.
Blue cross blue shield has limited resources to educate their customers, and lack of personalize guidance, and offering variety of plans with no recommendation.
Kaiser Permanente doesn’t show any plan information unless you are their customers, so how a new user will know how a plan works and what’s best plan for them? They are providing some basic explanations of terms but in a complicated language
User's Pains, Impressions, Interpretations:
User Personas & Journey Maps:
From Insights to draw Design Solutions:
Educational guide of health insurance
From conducting interviews, it was cleared that many users are struggling to understand the insurance language, due to this barrier they always get confused and frustrated.
Discounts/Coupons
Many users reported that they find medications very expensive and with surprise bills, it become so difficult to cover all the expenses.
Providing Assistance
Users reported that its hard to get in touch with customer support of health insurance, they hardly answer any query.
Low Fidelity Wireframes:
On this step, we tried to provide solution in the form of education app of health insurance which is based on three levels, basic, intermediate, and advanced level. After completing the basic level you can unlock the second level, and upon completion of a course, user will be provided with a certificate and a coupon code which is applicable on medication
Highfidelity Prototypes:
01. Onboarding Screens
- Simple Sign up and log in interface and screen was created for the user to sign up and get access to the application
- Initial Screen testing: Upon log in, the user will be prompted with a series of questions that will test their current knowledge of health insurance and offer course suggestions based on their results. This will allow users to have personalized lesson plans tailored to their needs in this learning experience.
02. Course Details
- The user will be presented with a high-level overview of the course such as what they will learn, the curriculum and a review. They are able to see the path they will take to complete the entire learning series. Which in this case is three tiers of learning. Basic, Intermediate and advanced
- Courses are presented in video and scenario format, along with option of forum where they can post their query, after completing the course they have to take a quiz to test their learning
03. Quiz Details
- The test will be based off the videos watched and will show the user their progress as they move through the test. This will allow user to know what to expect and how long they have left in the test environment. The Quiz will determine if the user is able to move on to the next series or if they need to review the content again
04. Course Completion Rewards
- Once the user has completed the series, they will be presented with a pop up that congratulates them on their success, they are then able to get a certificate that they can share to social media to highlight their success or an option to download to their personal devices.
- There will also be incentives given for those who complete the course. Health insurance is not a common thing users will want to study. Offering some incentives may prompt them to be more involved with learning about their health insurance plan.
- The user will be presented with monetized rewards towards purchases with health related partners. In this case, we are showing Walgreens which would be a place the user may be using their insurance as well as purchasing items. Ideally there would be multiple partners involved such as other pharmacies, health and wellness providers. After the users reward is claimed, they will be presented with a badge on the course they completed and know that it is time to move on to the next step to learning health insurance.
05. Customer Support
- Users can ask their query or report any problem to AI assistant, or they can email customer support
Prototype
Learnings
- As this was my first user research project, I learned so many new concepts of conducting research and how to empathize with users during interviews and drawing solutions for their pain points by considering all their needs.
- Gained extensive insights into health insurance plans, identified deficiencies within insurance companies, and consequently, introduced a resource for studying health insurance interactively, ensuring a user-friendly and seamless experience.
Next Steps
- If I will have more time, i will perform a usability testing on prototype design to see where user will face challenges in accessing the app and take feedback on overall design and fuctionality.
- Brainstorm some other solution to tackle this issue of health insurance transparency and language
- I will conduct more research and interviews to know more about health insurance transparency policy.