After joining GoHealth to be a part of the UX team, I’d come to the realization that the organization tackled entirely more business developments than I’d anticipated. Being an individual contributor on a newly formed team (4), my role as the senior product designer was primarily focused on developing and expanding the internal design into a scalable system with patterns and usable components. On the surface, this seemed like the most straightforward approach towards creating things for the team and fulfilling the responsibilities. I quickly realized that the opportunity to assist a variety of users in the healthcare space went beyond a SaSS product that I now owned.
Multiple product verticals for the health insurance tech company
Client
- GoHealth Inc.
- Web App (SaaS)
- 2019
Role
- Product Designer
- Product Strategy
- UX/UI Design
Tools
- Sketch App
- Invision
- Zeplin
My initial exposure to this insurance-tech company was through the lens of health insurance for a variety of consumers. As I developed deeper analysis for the specific audience, there was a distinct separation in demographics and behavioral actions. The more surprising thing was the suite of product offerings that were being offered. Tasked with crafting a user interface to accommodate the various products and the unique needs for plan selection boiled down to systematic organization.
Working cross functionally with a project manager and several developers led to understanding the deviations in product types, the acceptance criteria made for many edge cases. From single applicants in search of Health Benefit Plans to growing households with kids and prescription drug needs, the wide range of input states, filters and selections made this a robust application. Defining the specifications of each and the multiple inputs helped shape the user experience as the goal was to maintain consistency across the platform no matter the type product needs.
Identifying Users
With life events happening at random, health insurance has been on the top of the list for families looking to protect their family. Being in the healthcare space, the variety of products were introduced to accommodate the needs of the many. As Medicare consumers began enrollments at a higher rate than those under 65 years old, the team placed emphasis on feature enhancements toward those products. Segmenting these audiences became important to understand what needs were being met and shortcomings to evaluate, for feature delivery.
Our products are evolving to not only keep up with the demand but to accomodate the users that need them.
This was completed with a series of customer journey maps and workshops between various product teams (PMs, Engineering, QA, Marketing, Sales Agents and Biz Units) allowing for full collaboration. From video conferencing, Miro board work sessions and a host of other tools, we forged ahead with vigor to lock in direction and possible solutions. A research method that was used focused on sales agent job shadowing, which exposed a wealth of information about the most important content used during their calls. Once the information was synthesized and organized, I began exploring ways of displaying the data in an easily digestible way. 
Customer journey workshop with various stakeholders to identify user touchpoints.
Iterative Design
Knowing that product design is an iterative discipline, I spent time organizing working sessions to sketch ideas. Using the data, options on content layout, info architecture and call-to-action buttons were explored to get a sense of clarity around the metrics. The helpful part of doing this with the team is the goal of having shared knowledge amongst the group and learning the limitations of your approach, before investing heavily in a singular direction.
Early sketch explorations around the marketplace, shopping cart, etc…
Cards and Comparing Plans
A challenging part of keeping the cohesion within the products was a feature that seemingly became a large part of the shopping experience. Consumers became vocal about the desire to compare plans based on benefits details, coverage and most importantly price. This meant exploring a two part approach, as each plan had an extreme amount of information to expose at any single time. With some explorations and a quick working prototype, consumers as well as the development team enjoyed seeing this functioning as a sticky nav bar that didn’t take up the full quotes view during scroll. A definite win!
Interative design explorations on quote cards, indicators and more.
Consistent Components
Ensuring that the brand delivered on the promise of easy access to plan discovery, evaluating the design patterns became a primary thing to review. Breaking down each visual element became vital in helping shape the direction of the product and called for tons of iteration. After plenty of explorations and testing with several Medicare consumers both existing and prospects, locking in graphics modules and components helped streamline the platform.
A view of various components created to construct the design system (+300)
Scaling the design became easier as the application began to receive more traffic due to unique marketing campaigns and promos. Applying the branding and visual styles and patterns across both the desktop and responsive mobile had to be frictionless. Crafting system documentation and visual guides helped provide reference to use cases and application of the many elements.
Accessibility Standards
In casting a wide net to focus on the experience, accessibility became a heightened concern. While scaling the product, I referenced the WCAG Guidelines as a way to improve the display states of elements and color contrast. This meant testing for usability, column grids and using third party applications to check for AAA color compliance. Armed with this knowledge, applying this across the web application offered a bit of ease during implementation.
Third-party plugins and apps used to check for AAA compliance.
Scaling the design became easier as the application began to receive more traffic due to unique marketing campaigns and promos. Applying the branding and visual styles and patterns across both the desktop and responsive mobile had to be frictionless. Crafting system documentation and visual guides helped provide reference to use cases and application of the many elements.
The Results
Online companies have struggled to exceed beyond the 5 year mark and GoHealth has strived to become; and remain a household name. In implementing these changes to the product application and technology stack, these efforts led to an acquisition as well and a public offering valuation. Huge thanks to the PMs,Devs, Engineering leads, Q/A, internal marketing team as well as the wonderful users that were instrumental in the testing and validation of these features.
