Complicated information, tight budgets and recent changes to the healthcare system can leave consumers feeling powerless and confused. The way businesses can remedy this: accurate information, transparency and trust. Enter Informed Enrollment—a tool to guide the consumer through the healthcare enrollment journey. We spent just shy of one week on-site with our client, re-imagining their product, interviewing them, and reviewing competitive research and heuristics in UX workshops. We learned our client had a valuable enrollment tool with deep data, but a frustrating experience that users abandoned because it had 40+ steps! To move forward, together we mapped out a product ecosystem of key customer touchpoints and defined three personas that exemplified healthcare consumers. We explored their experiences in a journey-mapping workshop to lead us to the right solution. Our team then sketched with our client, to develop new interaction models and improved information hierarchies. In the new models, we surfaced personalized data at key steps along the journey to inform user decisions and reduce uncertainty. We modernized the visual language, keeping it simple and approachable. To validate our design, we prototyped and tested it with participants who closely matched our user profiles. We wanted to gauge how easy it would be to use last year’s actual cost information, out-of-pocket spent and anticipated healthcare events to help model a decision. The feedback from users was that our re-design was spot on. In the end, we created a beautifully designed decision-making tool that helps users make the right choices about their healthcare plan.

Informed Enrollment is worthy of a UX Award because it provides clarity and guidance for its users at a time when healthcare selection is at its most complex. It gives the user the tools and transparency to make informed decisions and connects personal data to decision-making in an interface that has been greatly simplified vs. its predecessor. The solution we designed was the product of a collaborative, user-centered process among business, UX, design and technology.