General Benefits Redesign
Disclaimer: All PHI has been wiped from any visual representations below. Any data pictured is fake and for demonstrative purposes only.
General benefits allow users (providers and offices) to see a broad view of benefits broken down by category and location of service.
Introduction
Background
Industry: Health Insurance Technology
Company: Cigna Insurance
Title: Product Designer
Product line: Web app (no mobile support)
My Role
I am the sole Product designer dedicated to this team, and am responsible for UX and UI design throughout the project. I work in conjunction with a dedicated UX researcher on my team during parts of the project including discovery, ideation and user research.
Constraints
Handoff: I was hired after the project had already started and had to continue the work done by an outside contractor.
Research: There was no research for this since it was a part of a lager project.
Process: The proper agile product development process wasn’t being properly followed when I began and led to many compromises in the implemented product.
Project framing
Overview
This work was a part of a larger project for the year of 2020. The larger project was focused on revising the patient detail screen and all of the components it contains while also adding new workflows. I am highlighting this work because these general benefits take up a majority of the page and has gone through more development than other components.
Problem Statement
How can we make general benefits information more readable, incorporate more networks, and include more information that will be useful for the providers when working with the patient?
Process
Example of an original general benefits accordion from the legacy site
Original
This is an example of original general benefits design. In 2020, our group was still in the process of migrating all users to a newly updated site from an older legacy site. This design was brought over to the new site and slated to be updated as part of the larger patient project.
Example of the original redesign
Starting Point - Initial Mockups
This was the state of the general benefit accordion mockups when I came onto the project. This was more of a simplification of the legacy design and was fairly clear.
After I took over the project I had two goals:
Remove any unnecessary or duplicative information so the user can quickly and easily locate the benefit information they need
Align this design with other benefit related work that was ongoing
Example of a revision aligned with other benefits work and internal standards
First Revision
An additional constraint that was added during this process was pressure to further align the work for our site with the design of the other sites. This design combined both the work I had done on another portion of this page (Procedure Code Lookup) as well as the structure from the patient facing site that condensed the benefit information into larger categories. This would provide two benefits to our efforts:
Our site would be aligned with the patient side site and make it easier for providers to communicate with patients regarding benefit questions
Combine 30+ accordions into categories and reduce the amount of information on the page overall
This effort was ultimately abandoned as the implementation of this would have required a significant effort on the part of the development team, something that wasn’t identified before we had refined the design.
Current State
Since we ran into issues with the development team’s capacity and our own timelines we had to rethink our approach to the the redesign and pivot to something that would take less time.
This design is similar to the older table but has the benefit of simplifying the information displayed and making it easier to identify the actual benefit versus the messaging.
Example of current state of general benefits
Finalized state showing all available information and structure under each procedure code
Future State
Recently we started working towards a future revision of general benefits. In addition to what needed to be displayed before we needed to include:
A 4th network
All covered services
Multiple benefits (coinsurance, copayment, etc) under a single network for different care designations
Limitation messaging
Care designations linked from the patient accessed provider directory
Another goal was to removed repetitive covered services information and break it out so that location specific would be clearer. Unfortunately, we could not accomplish this because of how the back end systems handle the data.
There is no word on when this will be implemented as of right now.
Outcomes and lessons
Feedback from the current state has been very positive. We haven’t done formal research but have gathered feedback from our existing online feedback form, informal reach-out, and internal reviews. What we have heard seems to support that the current design makes the benefit information clearer and easier to read.
Some items in this project that proved limiting:
A lack of user research to support design and layout changes.
Not enough communication with necessary stakeholders on the development team regarding bandwidth
Restrictive design standards meant that we could only utilize existing implementations of components that had been designed for Cigna’s other website with a different user and focus.
As said above, we are currently working towards a future iteration, however we will also likely push for a greater evaluation of this tool in the context of the entire page. Similar to the procedure code lookup project, we are unsure if there is a larger problem that needs to be addressed.