BetterUp

Digital innovation for Medicare recipients

Challenge

26% of BU members would prefer a mentor over a coach.
Create a third-party mentorship solution that reduces administrative overhead for Partners, while enabling mentors and mentees to have impactful conversations.

My role

Lead designer, researcher, zero to one, and shippable MVP

Highlights

Bringing digital innovation to the Medicare experience

As an interaction designer at frog, I worked with the digital innovation team of a Fortune 500 insurance company to explore the future of healthcare for Medicare recipients (people over 65). Our team was embedded within the client’s teams and worked side-by-side with them to help them leverage data and design to deliver digital solutions that enabled seniors to take ownership of their health.

The goal of the project was to help seniors navigate the complexities Medicare and better manage their health through technology and customer-centered services. We also worked with the client on research needs and service design for a new digitally-enabled Medicare Advantage plan.

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Objectives

User
The long term goal of the app is to offer seniors a single place to get all of their health history and offer them insights based on that information.

Client
Partner with our client to help them incorporate human-centered design methodologies into their process.

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Roles and responsibilities

As a designer and consultant for frog, my role was to partner with the product designers on the client side to help accelerate their process and introduce new ways of working and designing. I oscillated between working on high-level strategy and vision and in-the-weeds design.

On a daily basis, I paired with designers on the client side to design, prototype, and test new features for the health history app. I helped plan user and faciliate weekly user research. I also paired with developers to add new features and refine visual design.

ROLE SUMMARY
Product Design
User Research
Ethnographic Research
Journey mapping
Storyboarding
Service Design

DATES
July 2018 – February 2019
Done at frog design

FROG TEAM
Interaction Designer: Johana Tran
Strategist: Kamil Klamann

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Challenges

Client
Introducing human-centered design methodologies into an agile and engineer-driven, solution-first environment. The client team was resistant to our methods, so relationship-building was a major component of the work.

Team
Our team was distributed across three cities: New York, Boston, and Louisville. Because of that we were often working remotely, and collaborated using video calls and remote productivity tools.

User
Creating digital solutions for a demographic that isn’t typically tech-literate. We aimed for simplicity and accessibility in our design principles.

Data
The raw claims data coming from the Blue Button API was often presenting in very technical and fragmented ways that were hard to interpret by the average person. Our challenge was to translate and present it in a user-friendly way.

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Process

Ethnographic Research

We kicked off the project with a series of in-home ethnographic interviews with seniors in the Boston area. The goal was to understand their relationship with Medicare, how they maintain their health, and their struggles with healthcare.

We spoke with seniors, caregivers, and physicians. We split up into groups and I moderated 9 of these sessions, interviewing and facilitating activities with the participants.

Some of our learnings:

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Medicare.gov audit

Through a Medicare API called Blue Button 2.0, Medicare recipients can access their claims info. Our client’s apps accessed the API through MyMedicare.gov, an online portal for Medicare recipients. Through user testing, we realized this might be a blocker to acquiring users because the process was so convoluted.

Our team did a heuristic audit and offered a set of recommendations for USDS to improve the process.

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Service Design

A new Medicare plan
We helped our client in the service design stage of creating a new Medicare Advantage plan. Key features of the plan included giving the user a care team and dedicated care advocate, as well as self-service digital tools.

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Product design

I worked with the client team’s designers and product manager to design a health history app that would be one of the tools offered in the clients new MA plan. The primary purpose of this app was to give seniors access to their personal health information and medical history in a digital format.

On a day-to-day basis, I worked with the client team’s designers to iterate on the app and add new features based on user feedback.

Product Vision

We created storyboards to communicate the full vision of the product to fellow team members and key stakeholders.

Concept Testing

The client wanted us to explore how voice UI and natural language processing could help seniors with their healthcare. We created a set of storyboards that explored the concept of a virtual health assistant that uses NLP to process info during appointments. We showed to this Medicare recipients and physicians to get their thoughts on the concept.

Impact

Pairing, session value, positive impact

Full case study available upon request.

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Jo Tran, Product Designer

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