Health & Wellness Advocacy

I designed Advocacy solutions for Optum’s $1.9B Population Health Solutions suite of products focused on health and wellness engagement impacting consumer segments of 30 million people. Our solutions focused on digital self-service and helping members navigate their entire benefits ecosystem during all stages of life. I was the sole product designer for Advocacy and partnered very closely with the Head of Product Development and Innovation as well as researchers to realize the vision.

Year
2021

My Role
Senior UX/UI Designer

Focusing on the care in healthcare

Our vision for digital advocacy was about having deep empathy for the people we serve and seeing them as whole human beings on a unique journey in their life and health. Advocacy is about having someone on your side no matter what. Important events or circumstances in someone’s life are a crucial time when they need help navigating their benefits ecosystem. Whether it’s the birth of a child, a medical diagnosis, the loss of a loved one, or dealing with a natural disaster, life happens to us all.

Human insights

I worked closely with multiple researchers over the course of this work to understand healthcare consumers and how they navigate their benefits when they experience changes and transitions in their life. I needed to understand the needs and behaviors of the key segments that we serve and I was curious about how they think about and approach various life events and what their needs are when navigating them. I wonered how we should speak to members about life events and how it should be framed up in the experience.

One of the researchers I worked with conducted diary studies and ethnographic interviews to put together these Advocacy personas segmented by consumer health ownership (above). I connected closely with him throughout the project to deeply understand these personas and use the insights from them in my designs.

One way that I translated these personas into actionable insights was through a behavior and engagement analysis related to the life changes work. By outlining why each persona would likely enter the broader experience, how they would likely engage and why, I was able to conceptualize what those insights might mean for how we need to deliver a user experience to meet that kind of member where they are. My analysis is shown below.

Initial design exploration

Finding a balance

I worked very closely with content strategy and copywriting in the creation of my design concepts. We worked on many different iterations to try to strike the best balance between all the different considerations. Some life events are joyous while others can be agonizing. Since we never know what someone is going through when they come to this experience, we wanted to use content and imagery that was a good middle ground. Working on different variations of content and imagery together helped us identify what was working and what wasn’t.

Holistic considerations

I partnered with designers in other areas of Population Health Solutions to identify areas where it made sense to provide links to this feature throughout the holistic member experience. We identified areas inside navigation menus, in-page content, and custom components. Through research and ongoing partnership, I was able to influence the most prominent placement of the life changes feature on the broader Population Health Solutions landing page.

Design strategy

I examined different ways to present the functionality in the member experience. Some explorations were very guided and some featured more informational browsing. I considered Marcus and Oliver in my explorations and realized they would likely be overwhelmed by an experience that has too much content up front and instead would do better with bite-sized, actionable chunks. I wondered how members like Dahlia or Aisha should re-engage with the content and considered how we can use behavioral considerations or personalization in the experience.

Rapid iteration

I quickly prototyped for exploration and alignment with stakeholders and continuous testing and iteration on exploratory designs. I worked with a researcher to get multiple rounds of usability testing and interviews completed on various design solutions within just a couple weeks.

Key insights:

  • Participants noted excitement, surprise, and delight over the prototyped experiences, stating that it would be far better than their experiences they have had thus far and feel it would be very helpful in aiding them through their life event.

  • Overall, the prototypes were rated as very easy to use with average usability rating at 6.1/7.

  • Participants appreciated that it is a one-stop-shop experience where they have access to everything that can help them, not just some benefits.

  • Additional research was conducted on the most important life events for consumers and what the most important information relating to these benefits are. We were able to come away with a ranked list of the most important life events to focus our initial efforts on. Overall, consumers are most worried about time off and financial support during life events and are also interested in emotional support and education about the life event.

  • We noted that we should do more work on engagement and personalization strategies to drive members into this experience at the right time for the right members.

Design refinement

Bringing it all together

Our research insights and cumulative creative explorations along with content strategy, behavior change considerations, and personalized engagement tactics all culminated in the final designs.

Focusing on the consumer impact

Life changes happen to everyone. Even though they may not happen often, they can have a great impact on someone’s life. All areas of life can be affected by a significant change (finances, mental health, family stability, work, housing, etc.). They can have unpredictable ripple effects as well, so people also need help knowing what to anticipate in addition to help navigating the here and now. Life changes can impact someone’s life quickly and abruptly (like an accident), or steadily over a longer period of time (like an addition to the family). Things like this can bring about a range of emotions and can feel all-consuming. The most important things that people told us they need help with are taking time off work, financial support, and emotional support. They are also open to education about the life change. Keeping all of these things in mind during the finalization of a design solution was very important to ensuring that empathy was at the forefront of every decision.

Persona behavior and engagement considerations:

  • Dahlia is proactively healthy and perceives that it would be a hassle to take advantage of her benefits. She needs to have the value of any action clearly articulated to be in her best interest, especially financially.

  • Marcus is uninvolved and healthy and needs basic healthcare guidance presented in actionable, value-based ways. His main motivation for engagement is financial.

  • Oliver is uninvolved with emerging issues and doesn’t understand the value in preventative care. He is open to seeing value if it’s presented to him and is motivated by convenience, ease, and financial factors.

  • Vivian is very active in her health and well-versed in healthcare, frequently advocating for herself through her chronic condition. She’s likely to browse content independently and seek out ways to take advantage of her benefits.

  • Aisha is uninvolved with chronic health issues and doesn’t always know how to get care. She’s particularly interested in mental health and holistic care needs and would be open to engagement if the value is presented to her. Because she hasn’t been able to get what she needs in the past from healthcare, having space where she can get personalized, tailored support would entice her.

Design highlights:

  • Since Dahlia, Marcus, and Oliver need to see the value in engagement and are mainly financially motivated, each of the feature highlights on the Advocacy landing screen highlight the financial benefit of engagement and even use a little social proof.

  • I explored ideas for providing every resource to someone on a particular life change, and found that the amount of information available can be overwhelming. Dahlia is sensitive to feeling like it’s a hassle to take advantage of her benefits, and since Marcus doesn’t know where to begin with healthcare, he’s likely to feel overwhelmed by an experience that requires a lot of self-guided browsing. Oliver doesn’t have enough patience or interest to sift through mountains of information, and Aisha really needs to feel that her unique needs are being listened to. With all of these insights, I developed a UX strategy for allowing members to tell us what their immediate needs are and building a custom life-change guide based on those needs.

  • I worked through many rounds of revisions on the loading animation experience. Some iterations cycled through multiple icons and statements but in the end, I landed on a very simple yet delightful loading screen. I didn’t want to detract too much from my main objective with this screen, which is helping members feel like they are getting a customized experience.
    View loading animation

  • Because of the sensitivity with many of the life change topics, I chose to use some of the softer colors in the Optum palette to create a sense of warmth, peace, and calm. Optum’s primary orange is still prominent on the landing screen where a member may or may not be engaging in life change navigation.

Design highlights:

  • Even though the content in the guide is very personalized to each member’s need, there is still a lot of content. I worked through multiple iterations for how I might display this content on each screen in a way that is easy to understand. This layout used the most negative space in the most effective way so the content didn’t feel overwhelming. Understanding that members may already be feeling overwhelmed coming here, this was important to be intentional about.

  • The flow above shows a few main sections to the life change guide. Because of the amount of content that could be available, and knowing members may be in an already overwhelmed state, it was important to clearly separate sections of content and provide easy and fast navigation. The sticky navigation at the bottom solves for this.

  • In the life change guide, the member is first presented with what they told us they need immediate help with, and at the end there is always a section for additional resources. Members want to feel heard and understood but also may need additional help they didn’t even know they could access. This helps with discovery and allows continued engagement with the product because members can also save additional sections to the main portion of their customized guide. There is room for additional exploration on ways that members can customize their own experience.

  • Because this is a distinct feature within a broader experience, it was important to establish a clear and distinguishable visual system for life change guides that could follow a member through each place they interacted with life changes.

  • Upon re-entry to the Advocay landing screen, if a member had previously interacted with the life change features, their landing screen becomes personalized for that content. Knowing that if someone is going through a life change, whether it’s joyous or upsetting, that will be the most important thing to maintain focus on. This helps with building trust through personalization and promotes continued engagement and help for the member.

Approach and results

We had only 4 weeks in design to complete all this work which included multiple concepts and multiple rounds of testing to get to a final solution. I hosted daily project check-ins with product and content strategy partners to continue to make quick progress. I developed a close partnership with the Vice President, Head of Product and Innovation to realize the Advocacy product’s vision and make progress rapidly. Ultimately, though, once the final designs were delivered, the project lost funding and was not launched.