Patients First Insurance Portal

A portal app that simplifies the navigation of personal healthcare insurance.

Project Type: Course Project

Role: UX Research & Design

Tools: Figma, Invision

Duration: 2 weeks

Overview

This was a class project where I practiced using main UX research methods: secondary research and user interviews, creating a persona, task flow, and wireframes.

I was given the scenario that I was hired by a fictional healthcare company called Patients First as a researcher and designer. My task was to conduct research that builds an understanding of patient experiences more generally while attempting to understand how people manage their health through existing healthcare services and sources of information.

 

Problem Space

Navigating and understanding my own healthcare is challenging and intimating for me so I wanted to do research on what challenges adults face when dealing with and handling their health insurance for the first time. 

What kind of tool would help make navigating health care easier and less confusing?

 

 Secondary Research

I searched online to find out what reported issues and studies existed on the opinions millennials have on healthcare, how they use it, likes and dislikes with their healthcare, etc. Here are some of the common themes found:

  • Millennials want personalization when it comes to their health, have less trust in the traditional health care system, and are not satisfied with how insurance providers communicate.

  • Millennials care about their overall health and well being more than previous generations (mental, physical, etc)

  • Millennials are more likely to investigate and try to find price estimates to avoid surprises

“...millennials are more inclined (41 percent) to request and receive estimates before undergoing treatment.”

  • Millennials are ditching healthcare altogether or delaying or avoiding treatment due to high medical costs.

“...more than half of the millennials (54 percent) and Gen-Xers (53 percent) reported delaying or avoiding treatment due to costs compared to seniors (18 percent) and boomers (37 percent).”

 
 

 Primary Research - Interviews

To gain more of an understanding of millennials’ experience with managing their healthcare and to further supplement the research found online I conducted user interviews. Due to the constraints of the time available for completing the project I was only able to interview three individuals, but I made sure that they all matched the following qualities:

Interview Questions :

 
 

Results

During my interviews, I quickly found out that social-economic and professional background had a major influence on their experience with healthcare. They all had steady careers or jobs that provided health care that they were fairly okay with. Compared to my secondary research, it would seem like the individuals I interviewed are the minorities not experiencing the pain points Millennials face with healthcare.

Nonetheless, I was able to find some common pain points in their answers.

Common Pain Points:

 
 

I used these insights to come up with the how might we statement:

 How might we simplify the delivery of health insurance coverage details to Millennials?

 
 

Persona

I created the persona Jessica to help illustrate the type of user of this product, their frustrations, and how a potential product could help solve them.

 

 
 

Ideate 

User Flow

The task I chose to focus on for my user flow was to accomplish the below user story:

“As a user, I want to view what is and is not covered by my health insurance so that I am confident in choosing the right plan for my health needs”

Keeping simplicity and convenience in mind I wanted the priority of information to be able to be found in one spot, not requiring users to have to navigate to different screens to find information. 

Sketches to Wireframes

I wanted everything to be very literal and obvious for users when searching for information on their health insurance. There would be a home screen where users could select from a broad category. Once on that page for the desired category, they could find more specific information.

For my sketches, I sketched the “Insurance” page, where users can tap on the sub-category to view the level of their health insurance coverage in a drop-down menu.

 
 

Key Learnings & Next Steps

  • Research is a huge part of the UX process and I believe I could have dug deeper into the experience of millennials and their health care and in the healthcare industry as a whole. Because the world of healthcare and medication was such a mystery to me, to begin with, I found that the allotted time for research on the topic was not enough.

  • Limited time for interviews. Because of the limited time available for completing each step for this project, I feel like I got a very small view of other people’s experiences with managing their healthcare. If I had interviewed or surveyed a larger group of people, with a variety of backgrounds maybe I could have found more patterns in responses.

  • The next steps for this project would be to build out a full information architecture map for the remaining sections and pages for the portal. (‘Billing’, ‘My Health’, ‘Provider’).

  • Also completing the UI design to high fidelity

 

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