Provider Portal

Prepared for:

The Challenge

Zelis, an industry leader of healthcare payer and provider servicing, is seeing an under utilization and poor customer opinion of their Provider Portal software.

The Provider Portal should be an easy method of customer engagement as well as an additional revenue stream for the organization. It’s instead considered the weakest tool offered by Zelis and must be corrected in order to stay ahead of competition within this fast-growing market.

We discovered a strong desire within Zelis’ leadership to understand Human Centered Design and by making use of our extensive research capabilities, we sought to better their brand’s ability to recognize the importance of empathy while building products.

The Results

As a result of understanding the user and business, our team was able to provide a successful self-checkout experience that led to

35%

Reduced Reduced customer checkout time checkout time

Yearly revenue increase with shorter wait times

42%

Reduced workforce resources cost for customer service/support during the self-checkout process

The Team

Product Sponsor

UX Director

UX Lead

UX Designer

Business Stakeholders

Architects

Business Analyst

Project Manager

Deliverables

Digital Strategy

MVP Research & Requirements

Initial UX Ideation & Definition

Backlog Implementation & Planning

The Process

Discovery & Observation

Understand the Business

We hold in-person kickoff meetings to learn the history of the product, and what they know about the problem space and their user base.

Business Goal Identification

Role-Based Experience

The business team desired a personalized experience to better focus on services and functions needed for each unique user role.

Intuitive Onboarding

The app saw an increase in interest, but not in new users. To be profitable, the registration process had to be simplified.

Self Servicing

Poor app design led to an over use of support calls. Users lacked confidence to resolve errors themselves which was not sustainable.

Understand the User

In order to gain insight into the user needs, we conduct sessions with the users and ask about their experiences.

Customer Interviews & Surveys

Partnering with individuals within the Business Sector, we identified varying customers to reach out to better understand their feelings on the Provider Portal. Of those customers we interviewed, we discovered common themes in things they did enjoy, (self service tools and search capabilities), along with those they found to be less than desirable, (lack of mobile browser support, overall look and feel and tedious data entry methods). Now we understood user pain points as well as what engaged users liked most about the product.

To bolster the insights gained from Customer Interviews, we created an incentivized fifteen-question survey that was distributed to over 1,000 current customers. We asked what these customers liked most and least about the product, the ease of use of key components and their most frequent actions within the product.

Customers were largely uninterested in offering their thoughts on the product, which is common for those products or services within a low satisfaction rating. Those customers that did respond offered feedback that we clustered and compared to our interview findings. Similar feedback would later be used to assist feature prioritization, and new ideas created a deep backlog of future product enhancements.

Customer Segmentation & Personas

With over 40,000 new user requests per-year, Zelis had a lack of understanding to who was truly within their user base. Over the course of a couple weeks, we began segmenting users by demographics, areas of access within the Portal, and number of TINs they were associated with. From this exploration, we created five personas that could be represent each customer.

Three primary personas represented the wealth of the user base. We found that most users fell into the “jack of all trades” persona, who was responsible for several roles in their organization. The needs of these users would greatly influence the future of the product and the resulting informational hierarchy that would be representative within the user interface.

User Journeys

We often rely on User Journey Maps to visually communicate user’s thoughts and feelings to stakeholders. For the Provider Portal, we leveraged our workflow audit, personas, interviews and survey results to showcase each user’s path to and through the product and what they were experiencing.

For one of the most common actives within the Provider Portal, we not only offered the user’s thoughts and feelings but also where the user was most likely to call customer service.

Due to the quantities of issues that users experienced during onboarding, focused one Journey Map to visualize the experience. We identified three emails that users would receive during this process, as well several points requiring data entry that a user wouldn’t be able to cognitively retain. The users feelings of impatience, confusion and irritation were obvious, and greatly impactful during large steering meetings.

User Insight & Feedback

Wants

Customers wanted information that was pertinent to them to be front-and-center and not have to dig through menus to find it.

Pain Points

Beyond the painful registration process, customers resented the numerous, cumbersome data tasks to accomplish goals.

Behaviors

Customers were frequently turning to mobile devices for their business needs, and they were migrating to products that offered this access.

Understand the Product

To better understand the existing product we document the information architecture, and evaluate the design.

Product Features Identification

Informative

Error remediation and prevention, along with affirmations of success were necessary messaging to users to instill confidence.

Organized

Provider Profiling would collect all TINs under each provider’s umbrella and make them accessible via a single account login.

Responsive

Project success hinged on the app being reliable across browsers and devices. Touch-based interactions would be an absolute must.

Refine the Findings

Utilizing our research, we refine and solidify the project’s focus to better align with business goals and user needs.

Synthesize the Findings

Examining our findings with stakeholders provides an opportunity to redetermine business motivation vs. user goals.

Clarifying the Direction

What Do They Want?

Customers didn’t want to always pick up a phone to resolve issues, and the Support Team wanted to resolve problems more efficiently.

Why Do They Want It?

Customers wanted software that “just worked”, and overwhelmed the Support Team who couldn’t get to bigger problem resolutions.

How Will We Do it?

By redesigning the solution to eliminate pain-points, like ease of login, customers and the Support Team would encounter less friction.

Prioritize the Findings

Prioritizing features based on impact vs. cost/time further aligns the project and business teams for the project’s success.

Key Features to Design For

Good, Better, Best

To grow the product and the business, we would need to design tier-based optional features that came at a premium to use.

Clean Navigation

Each screen of the app was to have an obvious commonality; the nav-bar. The nav design would be a shared element for all features.

Consistent Design Patterns

Each feature would adhere to an established pattern. This allowed consistency in the design throughout the product and user-roles.

Conceptualize the Design

We create rudimentary designs from the workflows and user journeys in order to understand what actions will be available on a screen-by-screen level.

Conceiving the Interface

Visualize

Relying on findings from the heuristic and workflow analyses guided our wireframes to be a close representation of the ending solution.

Iterate

Using a fail-fast approach with stakeholders, we were able to iterate through multiple ideas quickly and effectively.

Converge

With the assistance of the stakeholders, we were able to validate innovative concepts and apply them to the early designs.

Formalize the Design

Adding a layer of polish by selecting the proper colors and shapes within the interface further enables the users to easily navigate the product to achieve their goals.

Solidifying the Look & Feel

Setting the Foundation

Selecting a core design language to build from afforded us with a shorter development cycle and easier adoption.

Adding Customization

We utilized our observations to shape the each function and component of the system to create a beautiful custom solution.

Visual Formalization

A consistent Design System led to a highly scalable and maintainable solution that didn’t require user training to achieve their goals.

Evaluate the Design

By utilizing high-fidelity mockups within clickable prototypes, we begin to validate and refine what will become the final product.

Fail Fast to Gain Success

Identify Blockers

During our usability testing, we were able to uncover areas where the users were lost or unable to complete their tasks.

Encourage Feedback

By quickly updating the prototype with user feedback, we created a collaborative environment where users felt empowered.

Invoking Delight

Testing the final prototype yielded the results we were after, users achieved their goals and were delighted by the experience.

Provider Portal

The Challenge

The Results

As a result of understanding the user and business, our team was able to provide a successful self-checkout experience that led to

The Team

Deliverables

The Process

Our Process

Discovery & Observation

Understand the Business

We hold in-person kickoff meetings to learn the history of the product, and what they know about the problem space and their user base.

Stakeholder Mapping & Interviews

Defining Baseline Metrics

Business Goal Identification

Understand the User

In order to gain insight into the user needs, we conduct sessions with the users and ask about their experiences.

Customer Interviews & Surveys

Customer Segmentation & Personas

User Journeys

User Insight & Feedback

Understand the Product

To better understand the existing product we document the information architecture, and evaluate the design.

Pain-point Identification

Heuristic Analysis

Product Features Identification

Analyze & Define

Refine the Findings

Utilizing our research, we refine and solidify the project’s focus to better align with business goals and user needs.

KPI Review

Workflow Analysis

Refining Initial Insights

Synthesize the Findings

Examining our findings with stakeholders provides an opportunity to redetermine business motivation vs. user goals.

Business Process Pain-point Definition

Clarifying the Direction

Prioritize the Findings

Prioritizing features based on impact vs. cost/time further aligns the project and business teams for the project’s success.

Feature Prioritization

Persona Requirements Mapping

Bullseye Targeting

Key Features to Design For

Build & Test

Conceptualize the Design

We create rudimentary designs from the workflows and user journeys in order to understand what actions will be available on a screen-by-screen level.

Wireframes