Health access for public employees
I was honored when Regence trusted me with designing the UMP plan selection website for the Healthcare Authority of Washington (HCA). Choosing healthcare is such a personal, and often confusing task, so it was deeply important to me that my team delivered an easy-to-use experience. Through relationship building and a concerted effort to align all relevant stakeholders, I was able to launch the website on schedule despite time constraints, technical limitations, and inter-organizational politics. Today, the website continues to serve its purpose and countless people have been able to select their insurance plan because of it.
Consolidating the HCA experience
The original HCA website was a maze of information with key content buried behind legal jargon and redundant web pages. My team and I improved this experience by:
Consolidating all relevant details and documentation.
Creating new design elements that present more information to a user at once without overwhelming them.
Linking directly to additional health services to help understand plan coverage.
Many of these patterns were specific to the HCA page, but have since been become standards on the Regence page.
Convincing a government organization
The most difficult process of this project was not the actual design work, but facilitating two large organizations bogged down in legalese to work together.
Demonstrate By illustrating the required user experience to avoid liability, I was able to demonstrate to key stakeholders that their preferred experience was confusing and unnecessary because users could skip it, anyway.
Simplify I proposed an experience with a single logic path. This was a better experience for employees, but did not address the pre-determined legal requirements. To convince the HCA to remove the legal requirement, we explained to them that this solution not only was the preferred experience of users but would also save design and development costs.
Lesson: Great design isn’t always enough
While I was working with two enormous, slow moving organizations, I learned that my most valuable skill was not technical prowess or taste level, it was listening to and advocating for everyone’s needs. By hearing others and helping them to communicate their ideas, I was able to build a coalition of people who were aligned with the same goal. Together we were able to create an experience that positively impacts the lives of Washington residents.