Blue Cross

Role

Research, Information Architecture, Illustrator, Lead UX & Visual Designer

Duration & Team

May 2016 - Mar 2018

3 UX Designers, 4 Front-End Devs, 2 Technical Lead, 5 Analyst

Understanding the Problem

New leadership's mission statement and its vision identified the need for re-branding and re-designing the digital experience. In addition, the current web presence is not customer-centric from research findings. Not having enough or missing important information online leads to numeric customer calls.

Poor Analytics

Meta data & tracking for SEO, analytics, and web user behavior was poor

Inconsistency

Major inconsistency with icons, call to actions, interaction flows, page templates and style guide

Hard to Find Info

Poorly structured information lead users to frequent customer center calls

Not Accessible

Website was not designed for WCAG 2.0 AA accessibility standards

Discovery

Actively communicated with cross-functional teams such as marketing, brand, print, customer service, content, mobile, and technical to understand the issue and possible long term design solution.

Let's make it customer-centric
Created a plan to gather information for such a large site
Let's bring everyone on the same page
Let's reach out to actual customers and gather feedback
Follow the new brand guidelines exactly to create a user-friendly experience

Image Credit: @Google

I wanted to start reviewing Google Analytics and WebTrends to understand user behavior and site traffic. This gave me the next step to prepare site page reports and worked with the team to identify what's needed and removed.

Site Audit and Analysis

Design Process

Started with Information Architecture

Search is not a part of the current site so we wanted to make sure that users find what they are looking for easily and faster. We looked at our data set, industry standards, financial websites, and competitor's websites to start with. We designed some card sort activities, chalkboard study, 5 seconds test and more.

Collaborated with Brand Team

Some brand guidelines came from Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) at first and since Premera is an independent licensee they allowed flexibility to have its own identity. An agency helped to create some rebranding and following that guideline was the starting point for us.

Started Working on Style Guide

In order to build the user-centric user experience, we needed to build a solid design foundation. There was some limitation using the bootstrap responsive framework. As a large organization, we needed a well designed and open-source design system that can unite brand, style, interaction, UX best practices and design principle in one.

Building Style-Guide

Design Critics and Illustrations

I also worked with the brand team's graphic designer as well mobile team's visual designer to come up with a fine set of illustration library

Measure of Success

Customer satisfaction score for a website

Current: 7.0 vs. New: 8.7

SUS: System Usability Success passing store

Current: 65 vs. New: 85

Web Accessibility Standards

Current: None vs New: WCAG 2.0 AA

Brand attributes QC tested and validated with the team

Lessons Learned

Communicating with tech team early on and getting them on board

Creating team channels and keeping key team players in loop all the time

Understand technology and constraints, however, be an ideal user advocate

Think big, have patience, leave the desk , go for a walk, and keep calm

Outcome

Successfully delivered a robust digital style guide with required redlines working closely with the tech delivery team. The design supports WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines. Premera started working with a tech partner to deliver designs in the beta version and eventually plan to sunset the old portal.