FINDING THE RIGHT HEALTH PLAN
VIEW PROTOTYPE
Simplifying the process of choosing health benefits
Choosing your health benefits during the hiring process or during your employer’s open enrollment can be overwhelming.
To help make this decision process easier for users of TAG’s open enrollment tool, I collaborated with our development and benefits team to create a feature that gives users more confidence when making their selections.
THE CHALLENGE
Many of TAG’s clients would receive a lot of questions regarding benefits, especially when onboarding employees and during their company’s open enrollment period. A lot of times employees that enrolled in one of their employer’s health plans weren’t confident the benefit selections they made were best suited for their health care needs.
As a result of this confusion, our benefits team would normally see an uptick in inquiries regarding benefits during our clients’ open enrollment.
MY ROLE
I designed the interfaces and structured micro-copy for this feature based on in-depth conversations with our benefits and development team, in addition to interviewing 2 clients and 2 of each of their employees that use TAG’s software to select and enroll in benefits.
The front-end developer and data scientist I collaborated with both seemed to have a pretty good grasp on how they could output the data using algorithms already defined within the system, but needed my support on how this would appear and read visually from the end-user’s perspective.
THE CONSTRAINTS
This project, like many product design projects, had a fast approaching deadline right from the start. The product development team began to examine this problem during mid-August 2019 and I ended up getting pulled into the project at the beginning of September 2019 with a firm 10/1/2019 launch date – a date that was selected to match with many of our clients’ open enrollment timeframes.
With less than a month to get caught up to speed on things before this would need to go into production, I had to get educated on stakeholder and user goals quickly. This meant I would only have enough time to interview a limited number of users before this feature would be launched, so it was very important I got as much information as possible about end-users from our benefits team.
THE RESEARCH
Key takeaways I found from meeting with:
Developers  Modal components already established | Benefits Team  Difficult to help employees with decision process since they can't offer suggestions |
2 Clients  Answering questions about benefits can take up lots of time | 4 Employees (users)  Even if they think they can save, they don’t change plans |
USER FLOW
Created user flow based on research, then validated with development and benefits team.
MEDIUM FIDELITY DESIGNS
Verified wording and how it would be presented to users with the benefits team.
PROTOTYPE
Rephrased the wording of the questions and refined designs for a prototype I created and shared with the development team for production.
VIEW PROTOTYPE
PRODUCTION
Worked with development and benefits team to verify correct answers were being generated. Some details needed to be ironed out between the development and benefits team, but eventually we all came to agreement on what results made the most sense.
REVISIONS FROM USER TESTING
To verify this system would help users meet their needs for finding out about their health plan options, we tested the stage version with 3 internal users, then revised based on what was observed during the tests.
POST LAUNCH
A few weeks after this feature was launched, we did hear from 5 of our clients’ that their employees found this tool to be very useful when selecting their benefits.
For our next release, we did find out it would be helpful if clients could have more control customizing the questions. This became apparent when our benefits team got some requests from clients to add certain questions that were very specific to their health plans.
All employees that we interviewed did say they never enrolled in benefits using anything other than a desktop device. However, from our quantitative metrics within the system, we did find that 20% of users that used the enrollment tool were doing it on their mobile devices. There were a few enhancements I wanted to make to the mobile version for the next release.
While this feature might not have put an end to all employee questions about open enrollment, our clients and benefits team did say this was a great resource to refer employees to whenever they needed help selecting a health plan.
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