Category
IOS APP DESGIN
Role
Interaction Design, User Testing, User Research
Timeline
12 Weeks
Simplified Health Insurance for Students
TCare is an all-in-one benefit information application that helps university students find and access healthcare information as needed.
Designed to create a seamless insurance experience through an intuitive interface, TCare provides an easy solution for students to locating coverage partners and tracking their health insurance benefits.
The problem
How might we create a seamless healthcare insurance experience so that users are able to find benefit information and coverage partners rapidly through an intuitive interface?
The Goal
Help university students to access healthcare information efficiently
Simplify the claim process for student health insurance
Create a solution for students to easily find coverage partners
My Role
In a team of four, I worked on this project as the sole designer. I was responsible for interaction design, visual design, and product branding. I also helped with user research, user interview and ideation to drive the narrative in playback presentations.
The Design Thinking Approach
1. Empathize - Research the Users' Needs.
Our first steps were to understand our users by talking to the students themselves to find out what they knew, what they wanted, and what their issues were. Our findings proved to be drastic.
For Domestic Students, out of the 24 participants, 100% of students did not know what coverage partners were, while 91% of students did not know the full benefits of what they were covered for.
For International students, out of 8 participants, 60% of students said that they were hesitant to visit a doctor simply because they did not know if they were covered.
Based on these stats, we created a persona, Miguel Vasquez.
2. Define - State the Users' Needs and Problems.
With Miguel's pain points identified, we set out to create a defined HMW statement:
How might we create a seamless healthcare insurance experience so that users are able to find benefit information and coverage partners rapidly through an intuitive interface?
3. Ideate - Challenge Assumptions and Create Ideas.
To answer the HMW question we decided to Ideate as a group. Together we brainstormed ideas to help Miguel, and came up with 8 different concepts.
While many of the ideas were creative, we had to make a usable product, and to do so, we have complete the dot voting activity on the most feasible and impactful of the 8.
Based on its feasibility and impactfulness, our top three choices are:
1. To present benefit information in a easy to understand way using visuals,
2. To make students aware of coverage partners and give students the ability to find them, and
3. To give students the ability to track benefit usage so they are always aware of whether they are covered.
4. Prototype - Start to Create Solutions.
With the ideas in mind, we moved on to prototyping.
We started by creating a user-flow to understand the journey of using the app. We then went through multiple design iterations trying to best address the needs of Miguel.
First we did a low-fidelity prototypes with the base features of the app. We conducted a usability test with 8 users and tried to find the quirks and issues with the initial design. Our feedback indicated that we must clarify language, improve the navigation, and add more features.
Low-fidelity Prototypes
With the initial user feedback, we then went back to prototyping and designed a medium fidelity prototype. It had rough layouts of the new features from our research.
Mid-fidelity Prototypes
Task 1 : Finding a coverage partner
Task 2 : Checking personalized information
5. Validate - Try Your Solutions Out
We took our mid-fidelity prototypes to 22 representative users at University of Toronto with 3 tasks:
Find a coverage partner nearby
Find healthcare information
Check claims information after a visit
Finding coverage information took an average of 16 seconds, and a nearby coverage partner another 36 second. That meant that the majority of the insurance search process took users under a minute.
The completion rate was equally insightful. All tasks achieved a 100% success rate, with only 2 student participants requiring a hint on the last task.
Our research indicated that users were understanding the dynamics and flow of the app, and were able to utilize it according to our initial hills.
fINAL LOOK - hIGH-fidelity Prototypes
Retrospective
This project challenged us to create, tinker and relentlessly test possible solutions on our users — and to repeat that cycle as many times as it takes — until we come up with solutions that people will actually use.
What I’ve learned from all this, is that as a designer its our job to solve problems everyday and create alternative solutions. We can’t let our problems be our story. Applying design principles to my own life, made things possible.
Should this app be further developed, I would:
Revisit design to add more help options and settings for navigation
Change confusing language and terms to better match real world
Integrate Claims process into app more thoroughly
Do more usability tests!
