Health & Wellness Design Vision
A design strategy for better health and financial outcomes
Overview
A product team of four business and four user experience professionals imagined how a retirement finance company might uniquely help users prepare and save for health care costs in retirement. The team synthesized product roadmaps, evolving customer needs, and emerging technical capabilities to develop a vision that defined a cohesive, integrated digital strategy supporting the mission of helping people confidently make decisions that result in better health and financial outcomes. The resulting vision drove product strategy and roadmaps for years and led to securing new clients and significant assets.
Role
Partner UX Designer
Key skills
Journey mapping \ Ideation \ Concept design
Opportunity
A retirement finance company renewed it's focus on helping employees choose and use their employer-sponsored health and insurance benefits as health care costs in retirement rose (and continue to rise). Who better than a top retirement finance company to help people prepare and save for health care.
The business had one question: what do customers need and how can we help them at scale? Our team was asked to create a vision that brought together disparate health and wellness initiatives into a personalized, frictionless, and contextually adaptive digital experience.
Process
We used a modified version of the Double Diamond method
Discovery
To better understand where we were best positioned to provide support, we explored the problem space from a health care customer, employer, and company perspective. We reviewed internal and external research and spoke with product, business, and technology partners in order to document current experiences and known pain points.
Define
With that information and new unmet needs research, we mapped out an ideal version of a customer's journey with employer-sponsored benefits over their lifetime—from their first job to retirement and beyond.
The ideal customer journey map of a single customer across their lifetime
We vetted our assumptions and refined the ideal journey with internal stakeholders, before we narrowed in on a handful of moments that mattered to the company: the sweet spots of health care and finance problems.
A sweet spot problem
Medical bills are difficult to understand—filled with jargon and numerous (maybe unexpected) charges. They usually come in the mail months after a health event and it’s never clear what actually has to be paid.
How might we make it easy for people to understand a bill and take action (make payment, dispute, etc.)?
Ideate
We brainstormed and added our ideas to the ideal customer journey, then ultimately generated a handful of conceptual sketches to illustrate more promising ideas which were used to help business partners imagine what was possible and help us refine our ideas into viable solutions.
Refine
Sketches were expanded and refined into conceptual click-through prototypes.
Select conceptual design prototype: allow user to scan a bill they received in the mail and get real-time benefits explanation, health plan deductible tracking, and health account balance with suggested next steps and diverse payment methods.
Results
The strategic vision we delivered, which was used to create product roadmaps and win new business for years, illustrated measurable improvements in value for customers over 5+ years.
Average score for concept perceived usefulness, ease of use, expectations, and intended use
Each concept was tested for perceived usefulness, ease of use, expectations, and intended use (scale 0-5, 102 participants). They scored an average of 4.1 and were described as appealing, organized, helpful, professional, engaging, and trustworthy—confirming that our vision not only aligned with business goals, but customer needs and expectations.