…Will you Accept this Rose?
The search for our final solution reaches its final phase of scoping
It’s been a crazy two weeks over at virtual A-Team HQ. Since our last post, we’ve interviewed 12 new users (in about a 5 day period), focused in on who we’re designing for, what we want to accomplish with our product and its features, and ultimately what we wanted to choose for our final direction! It started to feel a little bit like the ending of the Bachelor for a minute (just less drama and no roses).
We’ve got a lot to catch you up on, so let’s jump into it.
Interviews. Interviews Everywhere.
As Celine mentioned in our last post, we had the goal of landing on one solution idea by June 12th, which was halfway through this sprint. In order to get to this point, we needed to get a lot of user input, and fast. We scheduled a bunch of interviews in the days leading up to this deadline so that we could collect stories about people’s past experience with their insurance and care, and test our prototypes. As a quick refresher, these included a set of screens to help someone find a care provider and understand the cost (CostScale), a set of screens to help someone see what care they should receive over the course of their life (Financial Health Planner), and a chatbot to help someone address issues with their medical bill (AskMarc).
We wanted to touch as many different types of users as possible, so we cast a wide net. We recruited users ranging in age from their late 20s (making sure they were on their own insurance policies and not their parents’) to mid 50s, as well as those who were from low and middle socioeconomic statuses. Unlike our last set of interviewees though, we focused solely on people without chronic conditions, responding to the finding that those people were already motivated to pay attention to their health. To do this, we leveraged our own personal networks and utilized userinterviews.com to schedule 45-minute interviews over zoom.
These interviews gave us an entirely new set of feedback compared to the interviews we conducted back in February. We found that on the whole, people’s opinions regarding their experiences with insurance didn’t vary across socioeconomic status. This will allow us to simplify our testing down the line as we won’t have to explicitly test around this factor as strictly as we did in this round. We found that people generally had a negative preconception of chatbots, which generally led to lower ratings for that solution. We also began uncovering some patterns of motivation that would inform our designs later on, such as the fact that partners and family members often focus more on each other’s health rather than their own.
Synthesizing these notes, we wanted to pull out what the value each solution could create for the users and for Highmark. For our CostScale idea, the main benefit was that it could save members time and money searching for care, and promote in-network providers for Highmark. With AskMarc, we could save the members time and the emotional frustration of being on hold, while collecting data for Highmark and improving their customer service strategy and effectiveness. Finally, with the Financial Health Planner we could help members avoid long-term health complications and increase traffic to Highmark’s network.
Highmark Lunch and Learn
These values came out of our notes from user interviews, but we wanted to validate these ideas with Highmark as well. A couple of weeks ago, our client Hugh offered to set up a Lunch and Learn session so that we could share our work and get input from more people within Highmark. We took advantage of this to share the main intentions behind our solution ideas with members of the business, tech, sales, and customer experience teams.
This session gave us some great insights into our work. Overall, CostScale got negative feedback due to the complexity of actually showing the price of care ahead of time, as well as its similarity to existing products (“it’s like what we have, but on steroids”). AskMarc and Financial Health Planner both had strong support from a business standpoint. Highmark was really excited about the possibility to repurpose the call wait time with AskMarc, and tackle the challenge of holistic health with the Planner. One person even stayed on after the call to make a final pitch for AskMarc!
Our Final Solution Direction
With the feedback from our users and Highmark, we had a huge wealth of information to consider, so we did the only reasonable thing. A pros and cons chart!
CostScale has a lot of interesting opportunities to explore new visualizations of cost and quality around care, but ultimately shares a lot of similarities with existing products, poses a huge complexity to implement across various different plans, and doesn’t tackle the major needs of the users.
AskMarc has a huge potential to extend across Highmark’s entire business over time and provide members with help without needing to play phone tag with customer service. Highmark also has existing infrastructure that this could be built on. However, our team is not the best suited to tackle a conversational UI design, and due to the large number of third party chatbots already being developed this isn’t the most unique value we could provide to Highmark. Additionally, Highmark was most excited about the possibility of making better use of a member’s time on hold, but a chatbot isn’t the best way to tackle that.
Financial Health Planner tackles a unique problem that Highmark hasn’t been able to address yet. It puts health first (which resonated well with our user research) and presents the best opportunity to incorporate the research we conducted around motivation and engagement. But this is definitely the most challenging problem for us to tackle, and has the weakest technical infrastructure currently in place.
So all put together, we came to our final solution… drumroll!
Financial Health Planner! This is definitely the problem we are most excited to tackle, and where we feel we have the most to offer Highmark as a team. With this idea nailed down, we refocused ourselves to tackle this head-on over the remainder of the summer.
A Quick Break
But first, after a hectic week we wanted to take a couple of days of mental break so that we could come back recharged and with fresh eyes. We were even able to come together as a team in-person for the first time since March to surprise Ekta for her birthday!
Choosing our Targets
Once we came back to work, we realized we needed to scope our solution even further before we could start designing. Even though in the long run we realize that the Planner solution could be a product that could be used by anybody, we needed to start by designing for somebody to prove our concept.
So who is this somebody? We didn’t want to target a specific demographic, but rather a particular set of psychographic features. We wanted to identify a type of user that we felt could be most helped by our product. This came down to the factors of motivation and knowledge. We wanted to focus on people without a high amount of health knowledge, as well as those who have not been burned by the system (and thus are adverse to interacting with their care now) and who aren’t already going to their doctor regularly (users we labelled as “health curious”). This type of member was at a critical point where they could either be motivated or burned, and we wanted to help push them toward the former.
However, recruiting interviewees based on these qualities would be hard given our remote situation. While we have access to online recruiting resources, we have limited control over who can respond to our requests beyond a few screener questions, and no way to ensure that the questions are being answered accurately (people’s assessment of themselves might not reflect their true state).
To avoid issues, we wanted to nail down a concrete demographic for our persona for testing purposes, aiming to embed our ideal psychographics as well. We decided to target healthy people in their late 20s and early 30s, since they haven’t been burned by the system but are likely to just be starting their health journey on their own, and thus have a lower level of knowledge and current engagement. We wanted to focus on people who are married/in a relationship (to explore as a potential motivating factor) and with a family health history (since this is extremely common and can make one’s health more salient).
So with our user defined, we turned to what segment of their journey to focus on with our solution. Since the opportunity that excited both our team and Highmark the most was the opportunity to get more engagement, it made sense to hone in on getting more people to go to their doctor regularly and help them make more informed decisions to control their care. By doing this we can save both Highmark and its members money, and decrease the risk of long-term conditions going unnoticed and getting worse. This became our goal, and what we ultimately want to accomplish by the end of our project.
Flushing out Some Features
So how can we motivate members and make them better informed? Again, there are a lot of different routes we can take, but in the interest of starting small we wanted to explore features that focused on motivation and education. These include many of the aspects of our original prototype, such as showing what treatments are recommended and helping plan out a schedule to get care. We worked in additional ideas based on what we learned from our user testing and motivational research, such as a family view, a competitive game aspect, and recommended ways to bundle appointments together. This left us with about 12 features altogether that we want to move to a mid-fi prototype.
Once we do that, we’re back off to another round of testing! Past that, we’re full speed ahead with designing our solution to motivate people to go to the doctors, and we’re excited to take you along for the ride in the next post!
-The A Team
