The Challenge 🕰️

Making health insurance easy to understand

The Blue Cross Blue Shield Michigan Member Portal serves as the digital gateway for members to access their health coverage, claims history, wellness benefits, and network providers. Our team was tasked with reimagining this critical platform by identifying members' primary concerns and making financial information more intuitive so we can empowering users to effectively manage their healthcare costs.

We conducted a comprehensive redesign of the entire member portal, with special attention to areas where users experienced the greatest friction. Through extensive user research and iterative design, we created a conceptual prototype that prioritized clarity, accessibility, and user-centered information architecture.

TL;DR: The build was approved!

My Role 🎨

Enjoying a project core to the trade as a Senior UX Designer

I was responsible for interaction design, workshopping information architecture, page layouts, designing components and usability testing. I worked with one other UX designer and one visual designer. I was involved in monitoring work for all disciplines to ensure a cohesive experience and communicating with the client regularly to negotiate requirements and review progress. This page reflects decisions I was directly responsible for.

Key Design Challenges 🚀

1. A Homepage To Everything

It's not just a first impression. Creating an intuitive entry point to complex healthcare information

The Problem: 

The homepage serves as the critical gateway to the entire member experience. Our team faced a fundamental design question: should we immediately present comprehensive account information, or first allow users to make intentional navigation choices before revealing detailed content?

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

1. Information-Rich Design: The first prototype provided an immediate comprehensive dashboard with account details, care team information, and benefit highlights all visible at first glance.

2. Decision-First Design: The second prototype embraced simplicity, presenting clear navigation options that allowed users to deliberately choose their path before encountering detailed information.

   
   

User testing revealed compelling results. While both approaches achieved similar task success rates, the simpler decision-first design significantly reduced task completion time. More importantly, users reported feeling less overwhelmed and expressed greater satisfaction with the navigation experience.

The streamlined approach proved that effective healthcare portal design isn't about displaying maximum information upfront; it's about empowering users with clear choices that guide them to exactly what they need, when they need it.

2. Finding Care and Costs

Combining two traditionally separate user flows into one for greater visibility

The Problem: 

Members faced a significant hurdle when planning their healthcare: while they could search for providers through the BCBSM portal, the existing cost estimation tools weren't personalized to their specific insurance plans. This disconnection forced members to navigate two entirely separate journeys to answer the essential questions: "Who can provide my care?" and "How much will it cost me?"

The Solution:

I recognized that these two critical decision points naturally belong together in the member's mental model. This insight led to the development of an integrated search experience that accommodates diverse user approaches:

• Search by specialist type (e.g., cardiologist, dermatologist)

• Search by specific service (e.g., annual physical, MRI)

• Search by location (e.g., hospital, clinic)
  

The redesigned experience seamlessly combines provider discovery with personalized cost estimation in a single, intuitive journey. As members explore their care options, real-time cost estimates—tailored to their specific plan details—appear alongside provider information.

This integrated approach eliminates the need for members to piece together information from multiple sources. Instead, they gain immediate visibility into both their care options and financial responsibility, empowering them to make fully informed healthcare decisions without unnecessary complexity.

3. Finding Care and Costs

Combining two traditionally separate user flows into one for greater visibility

The Problem: 

The claims page was consistently the most confusing section of the member portal. It generated frequent calls to customer service as members struggled to decipher line items and understand why their healthcare costs were so high.

The Solution:

I redesigned the page to address key areas of confusion:

1. I simplified the terminology by changing labels to more intuitive phrases like "The total charge," "Plan discount," and "You pay" to make the financial breakdown immediately clear.

2. I proposed a comparative feature that shows how a member's claim compares to others, highlighting specific actions they could have taken—or could take in the future—to reduce costs. This same feature was incorporated into our estimates page to provide consistent guidance throughout the member journey.

4. Plan Changes and Price Transparency

People hate change...how do we prepare them?

The Problem: 

Each year, BCBSM needs to communicate plan changes to their members. Previously, these updates were sent through traditional mail, resulting in a high volume of calls to customer service centers from confused members seeking clarification.

The Solution:

I created a solution focused on transparency and clarity. By stripping away unnecessary jargon and complex language found in the traditional letters, I designed a more user-friendly experience. I guided the team to prioritize information by importance and displayed the most critical changes prominently while allowing members to progressively reveal additional details as needed.

Impact & Lessons Learned 🧠

The conceptual prototype we developed successfully addressed key pain points in the member experience, presenting complex insurance information in an accessible format. Our solution resonated with stakeholders and received full approval for implementation.

Impact

• Won the client's work and long term contract

• Decreased the amount of time needed to find care and costs by 8 minutes

• Negotiated to structure data in a way that would increase price transparency

Lessons Learned

• Minimize the amount of decisions people need to make

• Everyone in healthcare wants to make things better. Don't assume people will not be onboard with ethical stances

• The right copy can make or break a user experience

Below is the delivered demo: