Mounika Konidala 

SUMMARY:

Welcome Booklet is a guide for members who enrolled in our health insurance and they received this guide during their onboarding process. We provided the basic details of their plan, tools and resources, and benefits of having our insurance in this guide. We have a six different format of welcome kits for each plan (Individual after 65, Individual under 65, dental, employer, and some other).

 

I led the UX research effort in designing and implementing a comprehensive user study via user interviews (with both remote and in-person sessions)  to understand the user behavior, why they don't use it often, and what makes them use it. This project set a huge milestone of UX research across the firm because of the no of calls received by the customer support team.

 

THE CHALLENGE

After enrolling in our insurance plan, we send this welcome kit along with their ID cards to their residence address. Our customer support team received a large pool of calls every month from newbies with so many questions that they were not aware of all of the resources available to them. Some didn't realize, for example, member login service and track their account details. The customer support team were aware of this problem for some time, and they wanted to redesign the existing resource (welcome kit) that would effectively orient members.

 

 

1. DISCOVERY

1.1 Stakeholder Interview:

At this stage, I had conducted a workshop with stakeholders including business representatives from different plans and customer service representatives. The goal was to elicit information from them about the type of data provided on the guide, the type of questions they received from newbies, and what did they miss seeing in the welcome kit.

 

We did a visual exercise of analyzing the data on the welcome kit and conducted one-on-one interviews to understand their experience and thoughts on the welcome kit.

 

We then had a quick debrief session to tell the story to the group. The session was powerful, and I have shared a lot about findings things around in the guide, understanding their benefits, understanding the tools and resources we provide to our members, and the most common questions they heard is who enrolled in this insurance?

 

"I have received my ID cards and a welcome kit, but it doesn't say anywhere that my son is included in my plan. I just want to make sure is he their or not?"

 

So the next step is to spend time with real end users to understand their thoughts. 

 

1.2 User Research:

To get a better understanding of customer questions I Conducted a survey with a broader audience to understand their thoughts and identify our opportunities to make it more engaged for end users.

 

We used SurveyMonkey tool to conduct this survey with a broader audience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sample Question from the survey

 

 

 

As always, we learned invaluable information from the people we met with. We gained a better understanding of how welcome kit plays an important role to understand our insurance throughout their life's

 

We learned about the different people involved; their questions and concerns, and opportunities for improving their experience: 

 

2. DEFINE

After the discovery phase, it was time to analyze users pain points, reasons for not using it, and opportunities I was to focus on in the next phase of the project development.

 

We received a huge response from customers and I analyzed the survey results using IBM SPSS tool. This helps us to understand the focus point of where we have to make changes to make it more intuitive. I can not share the presentation or findings as we haven't released our new designs in the market.

 

3. DEVELOP

I then moved on to develop phase where I would begin sketching ideas for solutions to solve our user's pain points around a lack of information, intuitiveness, and efficiency to understand the health insurance. 

 

I put together a set of guiding design principles to inform what the end solution should be like:

- Focused on basic details and account information

- The text must be legible, enough, contrast and easy to understand

- Must include a table of contents

- Should look like a booklet that users can save it for future purpose

- Information that changes often should not be included

- Include only the minimal information that is helpful

 

It's a booklet and our previous version is a bunch of loose papers and the user has to dig through all the papers to find the details. In a new booklet, we represented a table of contents and highlight the details in each section.

 

3.1 Brainstorming session with stakeholders on the new design 

It was time to showcase a solution for the important issues the team had: that the solution would be a printed booklet format. We decided the process of flow the welcome kit look like and where we have to keep ID  numbers so that way people will interact with it. We want to include a caption to the welcome kit that attracts users to pick it and read it.

 

In the second round of brainstorming session, I took a version back to the stakeholders and had them write down all of their feedback on sticky notes; then they put all of their notes on a master version of the guide up on the wall

 

This was a new experience for them and a new way fo giving more visual input. They really liked this format and It also helped me ensure we heard all of their concerns in the small time we had together.

 

4. TESTING

I then moved on to the testing phase where I would like to show the first version of wireframe to the end users. The main reason that I would like to do this phase is we made a change to the position of IDs in the welcome kit and the business needed consumers to open the booklet to find their ID cards. As a result, they expect people to read the booklet, but I was unsure how people would react when we promoted something new - this had to match users' existing behavior or encourage a change. To reduce uncertainty, I proposed an iterative approach to design => prototype => evaluate. These are the steps I took to make this happen:

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• Reviewed an early product demo with the design team to understand the initial strategy

• Gained consensus on research goals via a research plan

• Prototyped 2 versions of the booklet

• Observed and interviewed 14 people as they used one of the prototype variations

 

Results:

We had positive feedback on the content and pictures on the entire booklet, but a high percentage of users were looked for the ID cards in the entire mailing kit before they open the booklet. This feedback challenged my beliefs, and more importantly, I got a chance to understand what helps them to know the placement of the ID cards and It also allowed me to rapidly generate new ideas.

 

I implemented a few changes to the version 1 prototype and that helped me in customization into the prototype, users responded positively by looking at the signs on the front page of the booklet.  Continuous iteration elevated a nascent product design into something that could resonate with consumers.

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Outcome:

We delivered it to few plan customers and we received positive feedback from them. This reduces the no of support calls for basic questions.