How do you turn a clunky, map-based event finder into a sleek, user-friendly platform for Medicare members? This case study walks through our team's journey of research, design, and testing to revolutionize the way older adults discover and engage with healthcare events and meetings.
The previous experience for Medicare members and prospects to find events and meetings near them was dated, unaccessible, and hard to use. As part of a larger transition into Sitecore CMS, I worked with a team consisting of a UX Researcher, Project Manager, and a client stakeholder to better understand the business needs and user expectations to inform a successful redesign.
To inform the research, we compiled a list of important questions.
In order to start to answer these questions, the UX Researcher on the team conducted a competitive analysis and synthesized those results for the Product Manager and I to review. They looked at direct competitors like other health insurance companies, and non-direct competitors that host public events like Facebook and Eventbrite. The main dimensions we looked at stemmed from our initial questions, and were:
We also conducted a survey of 100 people who have insurance and would consider attending health insurance related events to better understand our potential user's preferences when interacting with event discovery experiences. 50% of these participants were Medicare age (65+).
From these two research methods we learned a lot about what our users would be expecting, including:
With these findings to guide me, I started to iterate on wireframes to find potential design solutions, starting with an event listing component. I explored including an image, call to actions, a description, time, location, and other information that would be available for each event. I wanted to find a balance of information that would entice the user to click through to the event page, without being too overwhelming.
After exploring the listing component, I worked on wireframes for the actual event information page. This page needed to display all relevant information for the event, encouraging the user to register for the event.
After discussing these wireframes with the team, I used their feedback and continued to iterate on the designs, adding more visual design to start to get a real sense of how the event experience could look and function. I used styles and components from our enterprise Design System to inform the visual design so that this experience would be consistent with other site sections and the brand overall.
Once I found a solid direction with the visual design, I validated the designs with internal resources. Through this process we discovered that prospective meetings would require a unique experience from member meetings that didn't include an event detail page. We focused on these prospective meetings and built a prototype we could use to do usability testing with a group of 14 users, half general population and half Medicare age. With this usability test we wanted to gauge how easy users found the experience, and if they felt anything was missing.
One of the biggest pieces of feedback we got from the usability test was to add the distance from the user's location to the event location as part of the event listing to make it easier to select the closest event.
After the design and development hand off was completed, this feature was placed into the backlog in order to prioritize higher impact features, but the team is looking forward to implementing all this work and continuing to iterate on its success.