Mounika Konidala 

ROLE 

Lead researcher & Interaction Designer

 

ACTIVITIES 

Stakeholder Interviews

User Interviews

Participant Recruitment

Data Analysis

Survey

Findings Presentation

Create wireframes

Prototype

 

TOOLS

Adobe XD

Adobe Photoshop

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CATEGORY 

User Experience - User Research

 

 

SUMMARY:

At BlueCross and BlueShield of Kansas, We found that there is a huge drop-off in the percentage of people who shops for Medicare health plan in online and 80% of the drop from select plan page to the application enrollment page. In the current path, very less percentage of people going to compare plans page to explore all the available plans and a single workflow for different types of shoppers (product focused, browsers, and researchers).

 

THE CHALLENGE

- Drop off in numbers from plans page to enrollment page

- Less percentage of people prefer to enroll by themselves

- Self-service is missing

 

TEAM

Our team consisted of designers, content writer, market analyst and me. Each team member participate in all activities, and I paid special attention to developing our strategy and optimizing copy

 

 

Our objective:

To create an intuitive and easy to enroll with less amount of time and increase the percentage of people  enroll through online services

 

 

PROCESS:

 

1. DISCOVERY

1.1 Content Evaluation:

I sat down with stakeholders to evaluate the content, end to end flow, and analytics data of our existing site. What should we keep, remove or add? We realized that the existing end to end process has too many steps to view our plans and also not clear on the information we are asking during their enrollment. We realized the site had to give a better view of our plans and show the value of our benefits.

 

1.2 Information architecture:

The enrollment process has a lot of logic behind to accept the application of a user. The team worked collaboratively to develop a new navigation structure and showcase the same pattern of logic behind the questionnaire in the enrollment process. I did a brainstorming session with stakeholders to come up with the flow.

 

1.3 Competitive Review: I spent time looking at a series of competitor sites and understand the terminology they have used, and process of enrollment. Some sites provide visual cleanliness, simple and direct communication about the benefits of buying their insurance.

 

1.4 Collaborative, brainstorming seeking workshops:  I shared what I learned in my research with the stakeholders and understand the things that we can able to implement in our side. In the same meeting, I have provided a site structure and basic view of screens, and while on a hangout the core team moved content around and talked about our messaging flows. 

 

1.5 Wireframes and a basic prototype: I used a tool called Adobe XD to assemble the wireframes into a clickable prototype, which became the primary way we communicated about the project and was a huge asset to our remote users. Here is one of the many wireframes in the prototype:

 

 

2.RESEARCH - USER TESTING

I did a prototype testing with end users to gather feedback to improve the shopping experience and needs to be implemented in the redesign.

PROCESS:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OVERVIEW

• Current shopping experience for plan 65 is not very seamless and have a single path for different types of shoppers

• Team would like to understand the reason for a huge drop off in the percentage of people from select plan page to the application enrollment page 

 

GOAL

• Validate concepts

• Define what shopping experience means to the users

• Do participants see an improvement on the new designs for the shopping experience?

• Note: Current and potential (new) plan 65 shopping experience flows needs to be shown to participants

• Find the success rates on the new designs

•  Identify the design or usability issues

 

CHALLENGES

• Requirement - We spent so much of time in recruiting as we didn't see any interest from the consumers at the first round emails and then we included an incentive to get responses from consumers. Even though it doesn't help many people to respond immediately. It took so much time to get the right people for the research session

• Without a fully working prototype made it more difficult to gather user's real feelings and behaviors (especially in a remote setting)

 

OUTCOMES

• Participants liked the ability to explore our plans before we asked for more detailed information 

• Participants were unclear what’s the definition of all the terms presented for each plan and they don’t understand the naming format for our plans 

• Instructions, additional coverage details, and education piece could be improved for users and especially important for browsers and beginners 

 

 

*I can't present the specific findings and design recommendations due to NDA, but I can share the process.

 

 

Production, content population, responsive QA, Launch: I am in the process of implementing research findings and adding a new product to the existing shopping experience to come up with a new version of the design for Medicare. I worked with the rest of the team to get all of the content into the site on time.

 

I can not share the wireframes due to new product launch and process.

 

Work in progress!

 

 

 

 

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