DC HealthLink
With the Affordable Care Act, many states chose to develop online exchanges to help their residents and families get the health care coverage they need.
We led the design effort in a product innovation lab of experts to research opportunities for improvement and challenge our assumptions. We analyzed and synthesized available data, researched multiple requirements, and developed an "autobahn" or "EZ" version for the majority of users who were either employed or didn't require financial subsidies.
CHALLENGE
Reduce the users’ time and attention on the exchange while also offering them accurate insurance product options that meet their needs.
CONDITIONS
Users need to browse and shop for plans before creating an account. After their account has been created, they can pause, save, and return to their application. Users also need an experience that is mobile friendly from application, financial eligibility research, and plan payments through a profile dashboard in a future build.
Testing
In the original software application experience, users had to navigate 33 individual screens/page loads requesting various forms of information before they would be presented with the insurance products available, and those products were not filtered or sorted in any display.
Hypothesis: How might we reduce the user’s time and attention on the exchange while also offering them accurate insurance product options that meet their needs.
Then we asked users as soon as they entered the exchange to identify their employer in the District. That one data point of self-identification allowed them to bypass a lengthy pathway to eligibility and present them with only the insurance products available to their employers and within 8-12 screens.
Personas: Until a user creates an account, all users are ‘anonymous.’ Due to HIPAA laws and requirements, personal information cannot be stored or staged. Users must confirm consent and their information must be protected with levels of security encryption. The goal of a user is not to create an account. That’s a business need. The goal of a user is to find the best insurance products that meets their needs and eligibility.
We developed the platform to include for these new and previously-unspecified personas who we described as:
Anonymous Browsers - users without accounts reviewing all available insurance products for research and information gathering.
Anonymous Shoppers - users without accounts reviewing insurance products available to them, filtered by their criteria, sorted by their preferences, with the intent to purchase themselves or through a broker.
Nic is not only a brilliant and inspired design talent, he's brilliant at inventively and pragmatically bending that talent in the service of complex requirements. He's also a hell of a lot of fun to work with.
— Benjamin Rosenbaum, Senior Innovation Project Manager, DC OCTO
