Emergence of the Convergence
The end of the spring semester marks a midway point in capstone: on the double-diamond, it’s represented by the red center point where the two diamonds meet. There, we will have searched far and wide in the financial health literacy space, probed deeper into promising areas, converged towards a core problem, and be primed to explore solutions.
But we’re not there quite yet… We’re one sprint away from that, which means we’re currently synthesizing findings and insights, honing in on our focus area, and preparing artifacts for our spring presentation. On a high level, this sprint was dedicated towards refining our focus area and generating artifacts for our spring presentation on May 7th.
Refining our focus area
Thoughtful 3’s
In our last sprint, we identified that trust is a cornerstone for a successful solution in financial health literacy — without trust, members will be suspicious of any solution and be reluctant to use it. We generated a list of “How Might We” questions targeted at building trust, which you can view in our previous Medium post.
This sprint, we generated “Thoughtful 3’s” based upon our “How Might We” questions. To do this, we consulted all of our research with particular attention to member needs and values; we then combined similar ideas and narrowed from 15 to 6 based upon feasibility and perceived value. These ideas would be used as boundary objects between our team and users to elicit a concrete focus area. But who to conduct research with?
Persona Selection
A solution is only useful if it has an audience to help. Thankfully, Highmark has studied its members and created a number of personas based upon their needs, pain points, and stages in their health journey.
We reviewed Highmark’s personas, highlighted the commonalities between each persona and the needs we identified through our own research, and narrowed down to the four personas that most aligned with our research. Our four personas are differentiated by the following core characteristics: living paycheck-to-paycheck, financially established and health-conscious, in a health transition, living paycheck-to-paycheck, and a busy family schedule. Now that we had our personas, we could test our Thoughtful 3’s and refine our focus area.
Storyboard Speed Dating
Once we had our ideas and our personas, we conducted storyboard speed dating with respondents from our survey and usertesting.com who fit our persona’s profiles. We used these sessions to see how users reacted to the solutions and derived insights that helped us refine our focus area.
We found that trust increases when:
- There is transparency into how care and coverage decisions are made
- Members feel in control of their care and the cost of their care
- Members feel that their insurance company is on their side
Member Services Interview
We conducted a semi-structured interview with leadership in Highmark’s Member Service teams. Special thanks to Christina Palughi, Mark Hoover, Michel Bullard, and Stacie Cale for participating in our interview. For the sake of confidentiality, we’re keeping our insights internal.
The Big 3 Deliverables
Before the spring semester is over, we’ll generate three artifacts for our clients: a presentation, a research report, and a website, all containing different levels of detail suited to their particular form. On May 7th, we’ll hand these artifacts to our clients and walk them through our process so far, with the Spring Presentation as the centerpiece.
Spring Presentation
Our presentation will be a narrative that walks our clients through our research and insights, which we’ll deliver to them via Zoom. In order to create a cohesive narrative from all of our research, we created an affinity diagram of our research thus far, created “super-insights” from clustered insights, and arranged these super-insights into a cohesive, compelling narrative. Once we had a general structure, we flushed out the presentation with details. We’re really excited about the story that our research tells, so we’ll be sure to update you with our presentation when we have it done.
Report
Our research report is a comprehensive document that includes all the research we’ve conducted. It differs from the spring presentation in that it places less emphasis on a narrative and much stronger emphasis on showing our complete process. To create this report, we divided our research into our 5 focus areas: the problem Space & Highmark, Patients & Members, Providers, Employers, and Next Steps. We divided and conquered the sections, reviewed each others’ sections, and tied insights together. Our end deliverable is a slide deck that includes the purpose of our research, the methods that we used, the insights that we generated, and any artifacts that we created.
Website
Lastly, we’re creating a website so that our work can be easily shared and displayed. Our website will follow the structure of our spring presentation such that it tells a compelling narrative; however, we also want to account for the form of a website, which is not necessarily linear in content-consumption and is likely to be viewed on a mobile device. As such, we’re working with responsive design in Webflow.
Well, that’s it for the A Team this time around! As always, we’ll keep you updated with our progress. Stay healthy, stay safe, and stay sane out there :)
