CASE STUDY

Informed Enrollment

Product Design, Design Leadership, Product Strategy

CLIENT — Truven Health Analytics 
UX DIRECTOR — Peter Knocke
UX DESIGNER — Alexandra Woolsey-Puffer 
TECH DIRECTOR — Adam Chromicz
CREATIVE DIRECTOR — Theresa Monahan


Challenge

Truven Healthcare provides 70 unique applications to facilitate healthcare administration, analytics, and enrollment to organizations of all sizes. One application, Informed Enrollment, is provided to all clients and was in dire need of a refresh. The tool, while best described as a interactive presentation, had powerful functionality but was marred in confusing design and long process flows. Anchoring our work in deep research, we set out to change and simplify the frustrating and complicated yearly process of healthcare enrollment.


  Original Informed Enrollment Interface


Mapping the healthcare journey

The yearly healthcare process with the United States can be long and arduous for employees. At the onset of the project, I pushed the team to map out exactly what steps a sample set of companies would partake in leading up to, during, and after healthcare enrollment. We needed to intimately understand what steps employees were taking along with what tools were accessible to them along the way.


Yearly Healthcare Journey

Strategizing across user groups

While our focus was on the end user, the specific employee going through the enrollment process, the team quickly discovered that many individuals had drastic impact upon the yearly enrollment process at each company. We interviewed 30 healthcare recipients and mapped out their motivations and frustrations. Those motivations and frustrations were balanced with interviews with health care administrators and human resource departments who set up the yearly health care process. We could then see how the different aspects of concern had pushed the tool to greater and greater complexity over the years.

  
Yearly Healthcare Journey


Sketching interaction models

As the team better understood the various user needs and the yearly health care enrollment process, I facilitated sketching sessions. We purposefully kept our ideas low-fidelity to quickly imagine a wide array of interfaces each with a unique balance of content, data input, and functionality. We maintained focus on simplifying the experience while still letting the power of the tool shine through.

 
‘Wizard’ and ‘Dashboard’ Interaction Sketches


Exploring data visualization and visual styling

Since so much of this interface was connected to data entry or data visualization, we wanted to get early approval from the client on the overall visual style. The team crafted numerous Style Tiles to show different applications of the brand. As we compared and contrasted these tiles, we were able to have deep conversations and refinement of Typography, Input styling, Colors, Iconography, and Motion. These conversations helped us move towards a single cohesive visual language.

    
Data Visualization & Interface Style Tiles


Diving into content and structure

As the team weighed multiple interaction models and visual stylings, it became clear that we needed to add in details to best compare the options. I worked closely with the interaction designer to build out full sets of wireframes for each interaction model. We dove into content strategy and information architecture working across departments with the client to ensure what data and content was available and well organized. 

  
Detailed Wireframes for Each Interaction Model


Bringing it all together

With casual testing, it became clear that an interactive dashboard was the interaction model to explore further. We combined our visual language with a the dashboard model to test out the balance of information and interactivity.

  
Initial Dashboard Interface


Further refinement

Our core users were initially pleased with the dashboard layout and interface. While testing the Interface with them, the team realized that the large color blocks still made it easy for users to miss pieces of content or key data points. We refined our dashboard to more specifically use color for interactive elements and key data points.


  
Final Agnostic Informed Enrollment Interface

The final version of the application excelled by allowing for quick viewing of the previous year’s costs and categorization, allowing for instant updating of family profiles, and creating an easy way to add upcoming procedures for more accurate plan estimates. Even with all of this functionality, we still drove the user to view a final summary which gave them the simple answer  to the biggest question, ‘What is the best plan for my family?’.


Designing for specific implementations and adaptations

Given that this tool would often be sold as a package to large organizations, we wanted to ensure that it could be implemented with different branding and preserve it’s simplicity. We mapped out simple rules to be applied to our color system for quick theming no matter the client’s brand.

    
Color and Brand Adaptations for Specific Installations


Allowing for paper fallback

In the ideal case, and organization would be able to allow the Informed Enrollment tool to direct users to their specific healthcare enrollment application. However, this is not always the case. To account for times where someone may simply have to describe their ideal healthcare configuration, we designed a single page enrollment guide. This guide provided all of the necessary information clearly and could be printed out and brought to human resources to aide in the final healthcare enrollment.


Printable Enrollment Guide


Tested with flying colors

Upon the completion of the design process, we were able to complete sessions of qualitative user research with our users. Our participants were quite pleased with the clear visualizations and understandable configurations allowing them to discover which plan would best fit for their family.


“I think it is very easy, and it combines everything in one place where you can compare them, rather than having to go into each area. It was all there; it’s pretty comprehensive.”
- Gregg K.


“It definitely beats the UI that we have at work today… [It’s] very intuitive and comprehensive, in a very nice-to-see format. It gives you everything you need to know right in front of you, it gives you the picture you really need in order to make almost an instant decision.”
- Steven R.


Project Outcome

From out process of extensive research and constant iteration, the team was able to better understand and design a new healthcare enrollment experience. We were able to reduce a 20 step process into a highly configurable dashboard interface which allowed for the rapid creation and modification of a family's health profile. The client was so pleased with the process and final designs that the interface library started the process to be applied to additional Truven Healthcare applications.

FINAL DETAILS
  • Designed interactive dashboard, information portal, and exportable results
  • Created a white-label product which could be adapted to specific company’s brand language
  • Established an interface library to be applied across additional healthcare tools