Design research, strategy, and storytelling
Building new experience for health insurance producers at Premera Blue Cross
Choosing a health insurance plan is not an easy task, especially when you have to navigate through a myriad of options on your own. Health insurance companies often work with producers - people who sell health insurance plans and help their clients find the plans that suit their needs. Producers in their turn have to rely on information and tools from health insurance companies. And what would you do, when you have a client on the line and no information available online to help them? You'd probably call.
This project started as an effort to reduce the call volume, and hence the cost to our members. In the beginning, my stakeholders and I knew very little about the work of producers, but in the end, we all formed a deep understanding of the producers' needs to advocate for, to propose and to design a new truly customer centric experience.
"But we need to understand what producers are trying to get done."
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Timeline
12 weeks from internal kick-off to the best practices and recommendations
Activities
Research questions workshop using NCredible Framework by Twig+fish
Listening to producer calls
Expert interviews
Contextual inquiry
Synthesis workshop
Defining producers' Jobs-to-be-Done
Concept testing
Stakeholders
Design
Product
Content strategy
Producer relationship
Customer service department
Legal department
Highlights
This was one of the first foundational research projects conducted with this product team, so I totally felt the responsibility for making this process simple and understandable for my team of stakeholders.
Maintaining good relationships with partners was crucial to ensure these types of studies could be done in the future.
Impact
Research insights, along with producers' Jobs-to-be-done helped define and prioritize the features of a new producer experience.
My stakeholders shifted their thinking from "Let's give the users what they need" to "Let's make sure we understand what the customer needs to get done", and became our strongest advocate for customer-centric product development.
The Jobs-to-be-done framework helped us identify success metrics from the customer point of view. These metrics were incorporated in further design evaluations.
The new concept design received positive feedback from our customers and the key features were incorporated in the product development.
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My role
I was the lead and the only researcher on this project, partnering closely with UX design, product, content strategy, legal, and customer relationship departments. The initial ask from the business was to add a feature that producers had been asking for and to conduct a usability study. However, we quickly realized that we knew very little why producers were asking for that feature and how they were going to use it. Since we had about 3 months to lock the new designs, I used this time to plan and execute a more holistic approach to this project:​
I conducted a workshop to define a set of questions my multi-disciplinary team needed to answer. I used NCredible framework to demonstrate that most of the questions were in the exploratory or discovery space, and could not have been solved with a usability study.
I defined the research project scope timeline, which involved internal expert interviews, listening to customer calls, contextual inquiries at producers' workplaces, synthesis and ideation, and a round of concept testing.
I worked closely with the legal department and customer relationships to define recruitment process.
Conducted customer interviews, bringing my team along.
Facilitated, debriefs and interpretation sessions, synthesis and ideation workshops, helping my team get familiar with design research process and Jobs-to-be-done concept to my team.
Supported feature prioritization and product discussions.
Planned and conducted concept testing studies, and analyzed results.