Redesigning New York’s Health Coverage Application–Part 1
My journey started with weird changes in my vision.
One day, I was reading and kept seeing the same words on top of each other. Something was wrong so I consulted the almighty Google. After 3 minutes, I diagnosed myself with double vision. I chalked it up to screen time and thought the problem would go away. But a week passed, then two weeks. No change.
Desperate for answers, I paid out of pocket to see an opthalmologist (didn’t have health insurance). While he found nothing physically wrong with my eyes, he told me to see a neuro-opthalmologist to confirm it wasn’t a problem with my brain. I ended up paying more money to see this other specialist and found out after 15 minutes that I needed to get an MRI of my brain.
My heart sank. I had just forked over several hundred dollars and now I was being told to get an MRI that could cost another couple hundreds. At this moment, I realized I needed health insurance.
Applying for healthcare
Where could I get affordable health insurance? Everywhere I looked, premiums ranged in the low hundreds. But then I remembered the existence of Medicaid, a state sponsored program that fully covers health costs. I thought it was worth a shot to apply, so I went on the state’s application to begin.
Long story short, it took me more than an hour to finish the application.
It just wasn’t very user friendly. For one, the application was worded in a way that assumed I had an income (which I didn’t), and assumed I’d have the same job in 2020 as I did in 2019 (which, considering I was transitioning careers, wouldn’t be the case).
The document upload process
To complete my application, I needed to prove my income. But to do that, I needed a letter from my previous employer stating that I was no longer working there. This meant traveling to the NYC Department of Education during its winter break, which was a whole nightmare itself. After a bit of smooth-talking, I acquired the letter on the same day I visited; no small feat. But the hard part was yet to come.
To upload the letter to my application, I was required to tag it with an appropriate descriptor. But to find the correct descriptor, I had to search for it on this dropdown:
The size of the dropdown shocked me. Typically, a dropdown shouldn’t contain more than 10 options. This one had 137.
It took me nearly 3 minutes to find the correct descriptor for my letter. Imagine the collective hundreds of hours wasted by New Yorkers trying to navigate this dropdown experience to upload a document. As a UX designer, I knew I couldn’t live this experience down and vowed to create a better solution.
Rethinking the document upload process
How could I tame this dropdown? My initial thought was to categorize the documents within the dropdown into groups like employment or identity. With 137 documents though, there was a lot to categorize. It also meant researching more than a hundred different documents because I couldn’t tell the difference between an I-551 and I-776 form.
Luckily, I stumbled upon the NYSOH Document Upload App which categorizes all the documents into 12 high-level groupings like income and citizenship. I took stock of all the groupings and the documents within each and organized them on a spreadsheet.
Designing an alternative to the current dropdown.
Using Figma, I sketched and prototyped a menu to organize the documents into their respective high-level categories.
This was more organized, but I wasn’t satisfied. I placed myself in the shoes of a user and realized that even if I wanted to upload one document, I’d still have to parse through the high-level categories, and then find the correct document within the category. After scribbling the task flow, I also realized that my design didn’t actually tell the user what document they needed to upload.
I went back to the drawing board and sketched out two variations of a UI. This time, I wanted to make sure a user could tell what document they had to upload.
Out of the variations, I ended up moving ahead with the second which utilizes an accordion design pattern to progressively disclose information and reduce visual clutter.
After uploading a document, users need to tag it with a document descriptor. The dropdown was still appropriate for this task, but I pared down the dropdown options to match the accordion’s category. For example, the dropdown below shows only income documents since the user is uploading a proof of income.
Upon submission, a pending review status is shown and indicates to the user that they’ve done all they can. Now, they wait for the document to be accepted.
Here’s a before and after.
Why spend time redesigning a dropdown?
In the scheme of design, document uploads may seem like a mundane topic. In the context of a healthcare application, it‘s a critical step. If a user uploads the wrong documents, they may end up forfeiting the health benefits they’re eligible for. By reducing these errors, more people can quickly get the affordable health coverage they need and deserve.
Whatever happened to the MRI?
Medicaid ended up accepting my application in January, but I had to wait until my coverage became active in February to see someone. Long story short, the MRI revealed spinal fluid building up in my brain. I ended up seeing a neurosurgeon who drilled a couple of holes into my head and drained the fluid. So everything’s okay…for now!
