United Healthcare

Crafting solutions to simplify and increase prospective customers to reach the end of funnel for buying health insurance for their company

Background

UnitedHealthcare’s Small Business division was something the team has constantly been improving over time, long before I arrived. One of the biggest initiatives the team was pushing was to do user research that was beyond tracking Small Business owners using the site. Besides tools such as Usertesting.com and Lucky Orange (similar to Hotjar), the team was finally able to secure budget from the UnitedHealthcare team (the joys of agency life) to hold in person interviews with Small Business owners who are in the process or was recently in the process of finding healthcare coverage for their employees. UHC was looking to increase more small business owners to go all the way through the process of signing up (also known as “the funnel”).

Kicking Off & Goals

I collaborated on a team with two other designers, a product manager, and director. Between the three of us designers, we came up with a script, list of questions, and a plan for executing the interviews. We spilt up the tasks with two of us conducting interviews between 20+ Small Business Owners, while the other designer conducted Journey Mapping exercises with others. Thanks to our product manager, we were able to get two sets of SBOs between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, which gave us insight into various types of SBOs in different locations. One designer took care of interviews in Los Angeles, myself took care of interviews in Salt Lake City, and the third designer took care of journey mapping between both locations. Interviews were conducted throughout a few weeks in Los Angeles, two days in Salt Lake City, and a day of journey mapping with SBOs for each location (one day in LA, one day in SLC). We offered incentives for SBOs to spend one hour with us during interviews as well as for spending several hours with us for journey mapping. We captured both on screen movement with how the user was interacting with the site as well as video taping them so we can capture the questions and responses from both us as interviewers and the SBOs. For journey mapping, we recorded audio and took pictures of the process as the day went on.

Goals

For the user research, we had a long term goal in place. By conducting these interviews and journey mappings, this gave us more information as well as showcasing how important user interviews and other research can be to the UHC team. We would take these findings from our work and come up with various ideas on how we can improve the performance of the Small Business site with recommendations.

UHC was looking to increase the traffic through the funnel by 14%. Since our research started in Q2 of 2019, the goal of implementing several solutions from tests we proposed from findings in our research went into full swing end of May 2019. We presented several options of where we could see potential improvements to the client in early June. By the end of June, after collaborating with the UHC team, we came up with three different implementations across the site to help reach our goal.

Process

Our three areas we focused on for improvements were return visitors, profile page changes, and homepage data gathering. In returning visitors we approached this in a few ways. One, was activating Saved Progress messaging on the Medical Plans and Contribution pages to help assure confidence in the user that their progress was being saved as they went through the funnel. We offered two sets of messaging, one for people who had an account and were signed in and one who did not have an account. The messaging for users who came into the funnel without an account was focused on users to help save their progress by creating an account. It also highlighted several key message points why it benefits to have an account in the portal.

The second improvement focused on the profile page. Beforehand, any previous or in progress quotes were listed, but they never showed the next steps in order to finish or complete their quote. We expanded the page with adding any next steps the user needs to take, so they can see where they are at in the process. We improved copy across the quote page and the profile page to help streamline the language to make it easier for the user to understand. And finally we added functionality for availability for document downloads. Beforehand, certain paperwork could only be access by contacting your broker, now you are able to get the documents you need and share them with others (such as a business partner) on demand. No more hunting to try to find that email attachment from brokers, everything is all in one place.

Finally, our other area of focus was homepage data gathering, which came in two forms. The previous experience only asked the user to enter in their zip code and number of employees in order to enter in through the funnel. We added the requirement of entering your email address with the messaging to help save your progress through the funnel. This coordinated with our return visitor part of the project and also gave us a way to circle back with the user to check in on their quote progress. Another part of this project was getting the user to sign up for an account. This gave us more data points to use in order to connect with potential customers by getting their name, phone number, and business name. Since most people who search for insurance online, whether it is for auto, home, health, etc. need to create accounts anyways in order to obtain a more accurate quote, we saw this as no problem. Even during our user research a few months beforehand, some participants commented on creating a profile at different parts of the process. The prior experience had forced users right before the last step to create an account before obtaining their quote, but gave them the opportunity to create one after selecting medical plans. We shifted the experience around as a test to see how many users would do it upfront considering how other sites currently ask for account creation early.

All of these implementations occurred before the Open Enrollment period in 2019 (November). This was the best opportunity to test our ideas in action since this is when the site would receive the highest traffic. As of January 2020, not all the results came through yet, but initial numbers show a rising number of people going further in the funnel.

Looking Back

I believe there was a lot more we could have done to help increase traffic through the funnel. However, being in an agency setting, we are tied to the budget of the client. A lot of the proposed options we came up with after our user research included some long term investment, which in my opinion felt like a good direction to go in. Some of the proposed options including easy upload of employee details that were automatically generated from the uploaded file to the quote (very back-end engineering heavy), a unique “welcome back” screen for users to pickup where they left off in a certain timeframe (using cookies), and a wizard experience to help simplify the experience by asking questions of the employer needs to help narrow down plan choices. All of these, though well liked by the client, unfortunately were too development heavy for us to implement in time as well as being out of scope for budget reasons.

I think with the implementations we did do will help in the process, but I think it won’t move the needle as much as we want it to. Time will tell. There are other tests that are constantly in progress with that could possibly help out with moving that needle further. Majority of the tests on the UHC Small Business platform are conducted in an A/B fashion, so it’s easy to see the control and test results with users. In the future for projects, it would be great to have a product map out that includes several options and possible directions to take. I would want to be move involved in that aspect than just one side of it.

Other Projects

While a lot of the projects I was a part of for UHC was simple updates, I also got a chance to animate interstitial informational animations to help educate the user as they went through the funnel. Other projects included updates to the contribution page (adding spouses and dependents) and visual filtering options across different pages.

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