These People Aren’t Your Friends (And That’s OK)
How my health insurer’s “friendly” communication design almost got my coverage terminated
Health insurance is a miraculous thing and I’m thankful that I can afford it. Even in the United States, where our insurance system is the laughingstock of the industrialized world, I take it for granted that I can have two daughters brought safely into the world (one via C-section), my wife’s melanoma excised, and my depression treated — all without going bankrupt, taking a second or third job, or selling our house. Sure, the premiums aren’t cheap, and if something truly catastrophic happened, who knows what dire financial straits we’d be plunged into. But mostly, my health insurance does the job I hire it for, which is to let me (mostly) not worry about this stuff.
My family is covered by Moda Health, a Portland, Oregon-based provider that used to be called ODS Health before they rebranded in 2012. This rebranding (spearheaded by Ziba, an experience-design agency also headquartered in Portland) was intended to reposition the company as “more member-focused” and retail-oriented — more like Starbucks than Halliburton, in other words. “Our researchers found that consumers don’t want their health insurer to be just a spreadsheet,” says Rob Wees, an art director at Ziba who worked on the ODS/Moda rebranding. “They want some relationship to be there.”
In a post-Obamacare landscape where more people “shop” for their health insurance, this move made perfect sense. But what if a friendly user experience isn’t necessarily a good thing when the “product” is as serious as a heart attack?
From a user’s point of view, health insurers’ primary product is communication — although it can often feel like “miscommunication” to policyholders used to confronting annoying phone trees, incomprehensible explanations of benefits, and Kafka-esque claims processes. But either way, the primary “transactions” that occur between the insurer and the insured are exchanges of messages. And since these messages always concern two of the most basic and critical aspects of a person’s life — their health and their money — written language plays an outsized role in any health insurance company’s design strategy. And as “narrative UX” designer Jessica Collier has explained here in the past, “forging a product voice is a tricky thing.”
A couple months ago, my family received a letter from Moda that hewed neatly to its “consumer-oriented” communication style. It contained a few brief paragraphs, set in plain, unembellished type, written in an informal tone not unlike that of an email sent by a work friend. At a glance, it didn’t look like anything particularly urgent or important. And a cursory scan of the first couple sentences didn’t belie that impression: boilerplate like “thank you again” and “we’re excited to partner with you” commingled with self-consciously idiomatic phrases like “no worries — we know life can be hectic.”
My wife had to read it two or three times before Moda’s actual message penetrated her awareness. Turns out it was both urgent and important: Moda hadn’t received our premiums for the past nine months, and they were canceling our coverage unless we paid them in full — more than $7000 — within the week.
This message — you owe us money; pay immediately or face significant consequences — is the last thing anyone wants to hear from a critical service provider. But if you need to hear them, you want them to come through like a klaxon, not a casual “whassup.” A malfunction in Moda’s auto-pay software had caused our missed payments, but Moda’s communication design — built around their brand’s apparent commitment to a non-intimidating, “palling around” voice and tone — arguably had the more serious problem. If my wife’s spidey-sense hadn’t compelled her to read that letter multiple times instead of disregarding it like the noise it appeared to be, we’d have lost our health insurance.
Moda isn’t alone in this approach to communication. Simple applies the same design logic to personal finance: its account management tools look more like a Tumblr dashboard than a “proper” bank statement, and its written copy uses the same rounded, open typography and informal language that Moda’s does. And why not? For many people, balancing checkbooks and navigating insurance policies are administrative nuisances at best and intimidating struggles at worst. If a softer, “nicer” voice eases that burden and clarifies the tasks, everyone wins.
“The previous brand voice that we had [as ODS] was difficult for many people to understand, and was certainly not ‘friendly’,” says Jonathan Nicholas, Moda Health’s Vice President of Marketing. “Of course, this isn’t unique to us,” he adds. Indeed, the written communication of most health insurance companies has historically created a “personality” like this:
That’s pretty unpleasant—and ineffective. “Most people would say that a standard explanation-of-benefits document from their health insurer is a totally incomprehensible document,” Nicholas says.
In contrast, Moda’s brand voice and written communication sounds affable, competent, and reasonable. Basically a pleasant peer—and that’s important, that it feel like a peer—whom you actually kind of like to deal with.
Moda’s typography (set in a typeface called Omnes) helps conjure up this vibe. “I wanted to find something straightforward and simple, but a little more approachable than common ‘corporate’ typefaces like Frutiger,” says Rob Wees. The voice and tone of Moda’s copy—written by Jonathan Nicholas’s team in-house—does the same job. Just imagine the words from Moda’s letter spoken by the guy pictured above:
It looks like we received only partial payment for March and have not received subsequent months’ premiums. No worries—we know life can be hectic.
Jim from The Office would never unnecessarily harsh your mellow like those other corporate drones you’re used to dealing with. You can almost hear him murmuring to you, conspiratorially, like he would to Pam while the boss isn’t looking: It’s cool.
This is by design. “Because of your age and the fact that you’re in the individual market”—that’s industry-speak for people who purchase their own insurance plans, rather than obtain them through an employer—“you were probably receiving the ‘friendliest’ voice of the Moda brand,” Nicholas told me. “We were sending a note to you saying, ‘No big deal.’”
Now don’t get me wrong, I like affable. But when the actual message is:
You owe us money. Pay immediately or face significant consequences.
…a voice and tone that matches the seriousness of the situation would be a good thing.
When I told Nicholas that we’d received the “no big deal”-style letter, he was genuinely surprised. “You were nine months in arrears and we were being friendly? Now that’s interesting,” he said. “That suggests there was a glitch on our end.”
Part of modern life necessarily involves tangling with powerful, faceless organizations that in some abstract sense exist to “serve” your interests, but in practice assume a dominating stance toward you. Think of the IRS or your cable company: They demand, you comply. Like ED-209, the “enforcement droid” from Robocop (pictured above) who speaks politely scripted words while pointing high-caliber machine guns in your direction, these organizations don’t want to be your friend or even pretend to be. They mean business. They are also—like ED-209—intimidating, remorseless, and often unreasonable. But when their communication takes on this tone, at least you can be sure that there’s no ambiguity to the situation—and that you’d better not show any hesitation in attending to it. That can be an effective quality to bring to certain messages.
Jonathan Nicholas knows this. “We’re not at all convinced that a ‘friendly’ voice is what you always want to hear from your health insurance company,” he says. Still, having Moda whiplash its voice and tone back and forth between Jim Halpert and ED-209 wouldn’t be effective, either. So what is an effective, coherent “personality” for the written language of an intrinsically paternalistic corporation like Moda Health?
The voice I expected to hear in Moda’s letter would have belonged to someone like this:
Ed Harris in Apollo 13 is not your pal. He’s not your boss, either, but he exerts significant power over you. Doing his job requires making tough calls, but he is invested in your welfare. He doesn’t bullshit you. He cuts to the chase. He says things like “We have a problem” when there’s a serious problem, and “Failure is not an option” when he plans to resolve it. He’s unflappable and unsentimental, but he still acts like a human being whose decisions affect other human beings. He’s on it.
According to Jonathan Nicholas, the personality that Ziba helped Moda devise for its brand voice isn’t that far off from Ed Harris in Apollo 13. Called the Altruistic Scout, “it isn’t the leader of your party who’s going to take you where you need to go; it’s the expert who goes ahead and reports back that if you go left, this will happen and if you go right, this will happen,” Nicholas explains. “The scout shares with you the most likely consequences of your current behavior, so that over time, you come to rely on the scout because it’s accurate, reliable, and dependable.”
The Altruistic Scout is supposed to combine the no-nonsense professionalism of Ed Harris in Apollo 13 with a bit more non-threatening, at-your-service attitude. I picture someone like Bishop, the android in Aliens:
He’s not your friend, but he’s friendly by default. He’s not human, but he’s human-ish enough to make you trust him. He bolsters that trust with assertive action when you need it and quiet deference when you don’t. And, in the end, he has expert knowledge and special skills that you just can’t get by without. Where the security of my family’s health is concerned, I’d take this guy over Jim from The Office (who may obscure mission-critical information under a patina of informal geniality) in a heartbeat.
“It’s a great intention, because who wouldn’t want a scout in life working on their behalf?” Nicholson says. “But how do you actually translate that into hundreds of individual form letters? That’s something we’re still working on. In your letter, we probably crossed a line from ‘altruistic scout’ to best friend. And I don’t think you wanted to hear from your best friend at that point.”
