Presenting the right information at the right time was essential, but our users were looking for something more personal. The actions they take and the decisions they make on our platform are BIG for them. There needed to be trust. Trust we knew their needs or pain points, trust in our product and ultimately trust in us. Trust we knew how they felt during their engagement. I constantly tracked back to our user data for confirmation I was staying true to their needs. Just knowing a product can be more intuitive, more enjoyable, more beautiful is what drives me day in and day out! Plus, having parents that fell right into our core target audience, made it easy for me to channel empathy. All I had to do was to visualize them using our product.

"I'm old! I didn't grow up with this internet thing. I don't know how to do things on your website and I'm afraid to try. But I have no other choice!" – Marketplace user

There are many ways to measure design changes to determine whether they meet the intended goals. To help gauge our success, I settled on a series of user-centered metrics that allowed me to measure the changes we were intending. These metrics are defined as HEART – happiness, engagement, adoption, retention and task success. This framework is useful because it’s simple and easy to understand. It makes communicating the reasons for the whys easy across the team and across the organization.

We were making good progress but who could have anticipated what would come next?

Early in my role, I took the initiative to acquire approvals for the roll out new platforms and tools to help me gain user insights. At this stage of project, it  became a double-edged sword. For the first time, the ELT had some visibility into our users actions and intents. However, they were ill-prepared to effectively deal with the data load and often had a knee-jerk reaction to various inputs. One of those came as a desire to create a more contextually relevant and personalized help or education experience within the product. I recommended we put it in our backlog and stay focused. I was overruled. Think of it like a questionnaire or test that captures the users' level of knowledge and makes personal recommendations, I was told. So I got to brainstorming. Again.

I thought big. I drew inspiration from conversational experiences gaining popularity and adoption. What if we integrated a voice-like assistant - not your typical rules-based chat - I pondered? After a flurry of sketches, I honed in on a concept and rapidly iterated on it.

I imagined a more integrated experience instead of a standalone section within the product - which was suggested from the onset. By integrating this element into the overall product experience, we could have it "follow" the user along their journey. Ultimately, it would deliver them to their intended goal. With this part of the challenge I also explored the concept of personalizing or naming. After research was done on our core demographic, we agreed on Lisa. As it turned out, this would evolve as well.

As time and technical constraints surfaced, I scaled back my initial concept. Our MVP of this additional feature would now be a simplified interactive component which would identify our users' knowledge base and guide them on an associated journey. I established a (future) iterative path for which we could eventually realized its' full potential.

I began to increase the fidelity of my designs incrementally. For my high fidelity mocks I utilized the newly crafted (and constantly evolving) Design System Library that I had created much earlier in Sketch. It allowed me to output a series of unique layouts utilizing new modular components - dynamic in nature. Based on a particular type of user, the arrangement and display could vary. Additionally, upon log-in, the components would allow for snapshots of relevant user information potentially removing the need to navigate deeper.

Prototyping is relatively cheap to do and can be quick to create, making it a cost-effective method to validate and improve the user experience within the feedback loop. It can also help surface the difference between what users say they will do and what they actually do.

Building a click-through prototype allowed me to test my approach and gain feedback from some of our actual users. This feedback triggered iterations and re-testing, as it enhanced my understanding of our users. There are some simple benefits of this iterative design approach beyond its cost-effectiveness: It allows for rapid resolution of potential misunderstandings while establishing clarity early in the development lifecycle;  it brings out user feedback to ensure that system requirements meet user needs; It gives stakeholders better visibility of progress at each iteration.; It gives the development team some certainty that their efforts will not be squandered and it allows for easy incorporation of “lessons learned” along the way.

One of the most challenging skills of a designer is creative selection. This runs throughout the lifecycle of any project. It boils down to knowing when to say no. It's about trusting your gut and experience. It's about having great taste and always striving to refine and improve it.

This was as true now, when distilling user feedback on design iterations, as it was at any point in my journey to create a more streamlined, meaningful and friction-less experience for our users.

For me, work is a quest for knowledge and understanding fueled by insatiable curiosity. I feel the same can be said about life to some degree. As my curiosity never ends, neither does my learning.

As usual, I learned a lot. I learned that designing and solving problems for the ones who need to use digital tools, but lack the capacity to do so, is incredibly rewarding. This was reflected in my work here. As a designer who had no prior background in Medicare, all I needed was empathy, curiosity, taste and constant iteration to design an experience that can get our users motivated in the selection and management of their healthcare. With these elements, I've learned I can create meaningful relationships with your users that can ultimately shape our product into a boundary-breaking competitor and a market maker. The team learned a lot. As proclaimed by them, they learned the importance and value of process with their full participation in it early and throughout. I believe the organization learned a lot - that with effort, a lot of effort, they just might become more design-centered and user-obsessed as I am.