A couple of months ago, I applied for affordable health coverage in New York. Long story short, I felt urged to redesign the online application out of my frustration at the experience. So in this sequel to my first post, I’ll walk through the application’s usability issues, discuss mobile responsiveness, and propose my first attempt at a redesign.
Applying for Health Coverage in New York State
After the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010, New York State created the New York State of Health Marketplace as the place for New Yorkers to apply for low cost health coverage. Lots of people get coverage through the marketplace, with more than 4.9 million New Yorkers in 2020. Of those, nearly 3.4 million qualified for Medicaid.
The Process
With all government programs, the application process is pretty rigorous. For me, it involved:
- Setting up an account on the marketplace.
- Completing an online application.
- Uploading documents to verify my income information.
- Waiting for eligibility results.
- Selecting a plan.
Identifying the issues
Out of all these steps, the online application stood out for its usability issues with its sidebar and lack of mobile responsiveness.
Sidebar frustrations
The application’s sidebar serve multiple purposes. It primes applicants on what sections to expect within the application, acts as a progress bar, and and lets users backtrack to previously completed sections to make edits. Unfortunately, it did none of these perfectly.
Backtracking. I could navigate to previous sections to make edits but couldn’t skip ahead to where I’d left off without redoing the sections in between. Super annoying and time consuming.
Progress. At some points in the application, I had no idea where I was. Section headings didn’t match up to anything in the sidebar. Sometimes there’d be a chevron indicating my progress within the application; other times, there was nothing.
Priming. The sidebar doesn’t accurately display all the possible sections and subsections. This wasn’t a major issue, but it made me question why some subsections were shown over others. Also, “Find A Plan” wasn’t immediately accessible after completing the application so its inclusion gave a false sense of finality.
Lack of mobile-responsiveness
With the increase in smartphone ownership, people more than ever expect to access websites on their mobile device. Indeed, a study published in December 2016 found that mobile devices accounted for 43 percent of all traffic to governmental websites.
However, the application wasn’t optimized for a small screen. When I pulled it up on my smartphone, I had to pan around the screen and zoom in and out to even read the application.
“Just use a computer,” people may say, but 46% of households making below $30,000 a year don’t have a traditional computer. To me, it seems a little crazy to force poor families to somehow gain access to a computer before they can apply for essential services like health coverage.
Redesigning the Application
So my two goals for a redesign:
- Imagine what the application could look on a mobile web browser.
- Fix the sidebar’s usability issues.
Designing for phones
Fitting the existing application onto a mobile screen was challenging because there was just too much content. This is what the “Account” section of the application looked like after my first attempt.
Instead, I decided to split each section into multiple pages. My rationale in doing this was to:
- Reduce cognitive overload. It’s easier to understand bite sized chunks especially for those with less computer experience or those with a cognitive disability. Source
- Prevent data loss. Users have more chances to save their data before moving on to a new sub-section.
Redesigning the sidebar
It was near impossible to fit a sidebar onto a mobile screen because it would take up the entire screen. So instead, I condensed the sidebar into a stepper. Below are some stepper variations I toyed with.
In the end, I chose stepper 2 based on the following assumptions (will have to validate with usability testing):
- Users should focus on the section they’re currently in.
- Legibility is important for not getting sued (okay, not an assumption).
Still, I wanted to prime users for the subsections they’d see, so I designed intro pages for each section. Based on user feedback, I added approximate completion times to set further expectations.
For a desktop sized screen, I had more space to fit all the application’s sections and subsections into the stepper. I wasn’t sure if this was necessary initially, but a user validated the design, saying:
“I should be able to go back to any section and then get to certain parts of that section quickly.”
As I continue to layout all the sections for the entire application, ongoing usability testing will inform future iterations. For now, here’s a comparison of the existing design with my redesign.
Conclusion
The reality is that an official redesign of the application might never happen. Even on the federal level, tech maintenance efforts are prioritized over modernization. Though slowly but surely, innovation will happen due to the efforts of thousands of people within the federal and state governments. Hopefully, this post sparked some ideas of your own for improving government websites.
