The Challenge 🕰️

When one website needs to be everything to everyone, and work on every device

The BCBSM website wasn't just struggling, it was facing a digital identity crisis:

• Serving six distinct audiences with conflicting needs and priorities

• Individuals hunting for coverage while employers needed group plans

• Medicare members navigating complex benefits alongside providers seeking claims info

• Insurance agents requiring different tools than job seekers

• Desktop-only design failing in an increasingly mobile world

• Content explosion creating digital clutter with no organizing principle

• Legacy systems demanding compatibility with modern expectations
  

The result? A frustrating maze where everyone got lost, nobody found what they needed, and mobile users gave up entirely..

My Role 🎨

Design leader for a multi-audience website transformation

As design lead, I orchestrated the complete redesign while balancing the needs of six distinct user groups, working alongside one designer, an animator, and a content writer. I managed client relationships and made critical decisions throughout the project lifecycle. All work shown here represents decisions that I was directly responsible for.

• Created responsive layouts and a comprehensive component library for Adobe Experience Manager

• Led interaction design, information architecture, and usability testing with a lean team

• Transformed competing stakeholder priorities into an intuitive, unified digital experience

Key Design Challenges 🚀

1. Guiding to the right audience    

Where does the maze begin?

The Problem: 

Before the website was promotions focused and defaulted to "individuals" (non medicare) as the main audience.

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Using site analytics and talking with support teams, we determined that this causes confusion for BCBSM large Medicare base. They would look for doctors in the wrong place. This also caused issues for employers who were looking for a quote.

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How can we ensure all audiences are accessing the correct information?

The Solution: I developed two distinct prototype approaches to test these competing hypotheses:

1. Action-Based Approach: Start with the main actions that multiple audiences will find useful.

2. Audience Selection Oriented: Start with the main actions that multiple audiences will find useful.

   
   

After several dozen iterations we landing on these two options as promising enough to test. We conducted a usability study with 12 participants using  3 tasks to determine which one was more intuitive on both desktop and mobile devices.

We had some affordability issues with the Audience Selection Oriented designs and would watch users scroll up and down the page before getting anywhere because they didn't realize the audience text was clickable.

However even after adjusting this, we found that users were more comfortable selecting a task than selecting an audience.

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Because this method was so successful we decided to adopt this "Action-oriented" approach on deeper pages as well.

2. Instilling Trust in BCBSM

It all starts with creating a solid identity.

The Problem: 

BCBSM was having trouble communicating their brand message and value statements for individual business units (people who bought their own insurance, not through an employer). They leaned on being on of Michigan's largest insurance provider and were suddenly taken aback by their decreasing user base due to increased competition be smaller digital-first insurance providers like Oscar.

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How can we present BCBSM as a modern brand and highlight its reliability?

Problem Other Problem:

Another issue that BCBSM had was creating marketing sub pages for all their marketing efforts, but not creating a unified picture of their value. They needed a solution to show all their programming efforts.

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How can we provide a template for future sub-sites so BCBSM departments did not feel the need to make new URLs for every marketing effort?

Solution

I developed a two-pronged approach of peppering some storytelling elements throughout the experience that lead to this "About us" page that tells a story about BCBSM, their history, solutions and reliability. Each section supports claims with evidence and leads deeper into more examples. This template has an internal navigation, hero area and other elements we recommended BCBSM to use for future marketing sites.

3. Displaying insurance plans in a meaningful way

It all starts with creating a solid identity.

The Problem: 

Medicare, Individual, and Employer sections operated as separate digital islands, each displaying plans with different structures and terminology to accommodate their unique regulatory frameworks. This fragmentation created a decision paralysis for users, eroding confidence in their ability to select the right plan for their specific needs. Meanwhile, development constraints demanded minimizing new component creation while still solving this complex usability challenge.

How might we create a unified plan selection experience that helps users confidently navigate complex insurance choices while maintaining development efficiency?

The Solution(s): 

Ultimately multiple methods were used to solve this complex problem.

In this example for individuals we first introduce plans by category like this:

then show a page that offers a comparative table:

For Medicare plan categories, we show categories in a slightly different way to visually emphasize their differences.

For individual and Medicare plans, we provide users an alternative way of looking through plans by having the select what is most important to them and giving them tips on what to look out for. Due to legal reasons we couldn't directly suggest plans.

When it comes to medical plans for employers we adopt something similar to what we did for individuals - a comparative table. However , we highlight items relevant to employers like network size and plan complexity.

4. Making it matter to employers

Letting them browse solutions AND understand them

The Problem: 

Most employers do not access the BCBSM site directly, instead they are contacted by agents. So BCBSM never developed a public view of their "solutions". Solutions are products other than insurance plans, that BCBSM sells to employers. Without having this information publicly available agents could not send links to potential clients.

How can we share employer solutions and make them understandable?

The Solution: 

This problem took several iterations and tests with employer groups to get right. Ultimately, we landed again on a multi-pronged approach.

On employer landing pages we introduce solutions grouped by benefit right at the start. For mid-size business we put them above plans as we learned through interviews that programs are more important to employers than plans.

Once an employer gets to a collection, we show them the list of solutions shown through an opportunity framework. We found that when we simply listed solutions, employers were not able to immediately understand their value. This method tested much better as employers were able to comprehend the solution benefits quickly and without much reading.

We also wanted to make sure that if employers were in other sections that they could be introduced to the programs and so we created a component to do that introduction.

When the employer gets to an individual solution page, we show them highlights at the top before getting into the details.

5. Making it matter to employers

Getting audiences what they need fast

The Problem: 

All audiences had their unique needs and actions they are most likely to do. Again, we needed to minimize our use of components and layouts while also trying to solve for needs of audiences.

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How can we create a pattern to guide different audience personas to?

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The Solution: 

We went through years of data analytics and multiple interviews to determine what actions were the most important for each user group. The most important action we placed in the header while all secondary actions were placed in our "Action Component" below.

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Testers appreciated our straight forward style and how we didn't spend a lot of time making them dig through various links. In fact we tried to not use any mega menus or other complex navigation patterns to an easy transfer to mobile pathing.

Impact & Lessons Learned 🧠

We transformed a fragmented website that confused users into an intuitive experience that adapted to their needs while maintaining technical efficiency.

While I was not part of implementation. I was proud of the promising results and outputs:

• Built a component library that reduced development time while maintaining design consistency

• Established templates that eliminated disconnected microsites and strengthened brand cohesion

• Developed plan comparison tools that improved decision confidence using shared architecture

• Made employer solutions discoverable, enabling agents to share relevant offerings directly

And from it we learned multiple lessons:

• Action over identity: Users consistently preferred task-oriented navigation over audience selection—people know what they want to do more clearly than which category they belong to

• Component efficiency drives consistency: Creating versatile, adaptable components that work across audience needs proved more valuable than audience-specific solutions

• Evidence-based storytelling builds trust: Modern healthcare consumers need more than claims—they need proof points and authentic narratives that demonstrate reliability

• Context matters in decision support: The same information (plans, pricing, benefits) needs different framing and emphasis depending on the audience's perspective and priorities

• Analytics + interviews reveal the truth: Combining years of usage data with targeted user interviews uncovered the highest-value actions for each audience group

Enjoy the demos!