ABOUT THE ROLE
Premera's mission is to make healthcare work better. That's a daunting task in the US due to the way the system has evolved. My role was to oversee design and/or directly design experiences for members, employers, insurance brokers, healthcare providers, and the Premera call center. I supervised a design team ranging from one designer to eight designers based on business need.
Design Management
ROLE: DESIGN MANAGER
I was promoted to managing the full digital user experience design team in February of 2020. Seven FTE designers and one contract designer. I worked with management and product leadership for all digital experience applications on Android, iOS, SMS, Chat, and our responsive web. In coming together we were able to leverage our influence with the Premera brand office to ensure the brand color options included combinations that supported WCAG 2.2 AA compliance for accessibility. In addition we were able to pool our efforts to create a single foundational library for colors and images across all platforms, along with platform specific symbol libraries in Sketch, all managed by Abstract and InVision DSM. This guidance was published to https://premera.invisionapp.com/dsm/premera/mobile and https://premera.invisionapp.com/dsm/premera/web to assist external vendors in creating on-brand experiences, eliminating our dependency on https://designpatternlibrary.premera.com.
The expanded management role included opportunities to consult with new business divisions on user experience design. I found it necessary to offer guidance on how to get the most out of any engineering effort by integrating the designers with the agile engineering teams and granting them sufficient resources to be able iterate on designs prior to the engineering team writing code. Designers became partners with product owners on preparing the backlog for intake in the engineering process.
I established intake criteria for UX design that would lay a foundation for successful engagements, including:
- Supported by the corporate design strategy team
- Postulating a hypothesis for change in user behavior or attitude along with a measurement plan
- Committed to iteration until the desired behavior or attitude outcomes were achieved
- Committed to UX Design sign-off on the release
- If these criteria aren't met, the project is not a candidate for UX design engagement and it should simply use established conventions from the pattern library until such time as these criteria were met
ROLE: ACCESSIBILITY RESEARCHER
Constructed and administered a test protocol, and worked remotely over Microsoft Teams to screen record expert users of JAWS in accomplishing ten tasks on the Premera.com web site. The total recording volume was 10.5 hours of footage. I formulated a report leading to the filing of approximately 30 bugs, and evangelized the importance of addressing them by creating a series of Microsoft Sway documents highlighting the impediments to screen readers and recommending engineering and content changes to remove those impediments. My design team was able to find fixes to many issues using CSS, and to others using simple aria attributes, thereby minimizing engineering impact and any change for sighted users.
Premera Design Pattern Library
ROLE: B2B DESIGN MANAGER, DESIGNER
Premera's web design team embraced a Material-influenced redesign in conjunction with a significant platform upgrade. The design team agreed to a set of design patterns in order to keep the work of up to dozens of designers and developers on brand. Patterns were established through weekly team meetings to review proposed solutions to specific interaction and visual design issues. Proposals were evaluated by the entire design team, including our mobile design colleagues and our engineering partners. As subsequent design efforts identified interaction problems best solved by new patterns, our work practice of collaborating with design research and engineering helped us find the best solutions for responsiveness, scalability, accessibility, usefulness, and desirability.
Patterns were created in angular and css code as well as in a Sketch symbol library which was shared through our Abstract versioning system. Sketch symbols were augmented with specific overlay containing sufficient instruction for all engineering staff to know which controls to base their code on. These overlays were toggled on by a Sketch plug-in I wrote to reduce confusion or misunderstandings about the controls in the design. The living documentation was published to https://designpatternlibrary.premera.com to assist vendors in understanding what it means to be "on brand" for Premera digital experiences.
Account Registration
ROLE: DESIGNER
Premera rolled out a business strategy to outsource administration duties for a subset of its members. My role as a designer was to redesign the sign-in process to correctly route the member to the correct servicing experience. There were extreme technical limitations which ruled out most obvious design solutions. In exploring the workflow, I documented that our legacy account registration service was generating an unexpectedly large percentage of unsuccessful user visits. Utilizing Adobe Analytics, in partnership with our web analytics analyst team, I was able to discover and initiate mediation for incomplete logging of success states. This is still work in progress as I collaborate with our engineering team to find the source for the undercounting and also generate accurate reports.
The illustration above is an analysis of the pathways to the failure message. It is alternate visualization of the Sankey diagrams included in Adobe Analytics. I believe it is easier to overlay the user interface of the specific URL on the path to failure so that we can better understand the nature of the problem to be solved.
Future Concepts
ROLE: DESIGNER
My experience designing a solution for the account registration workflow taught me that our partners in the sales division did not have a clear vision of what a cohesive and connected Premera digitial experience could be. I was concerned we were losing the opportunity to create a better digital experience as contracts were signed which divorced the Premera digital experience from access to the real time customer data necessary to render a modern digital experience. I set out to solicit input from my fellow designers, and created clickable prototypes of several scenarios which would only be possible when Premera had real time access to all customer data. These proptotypes were used in a successful effort to bring more stringent data and brand experience requirements into subsequent contracts.
