The Challenge
Design a site that will help millions of people get affordable health insurance and explain the process to them in a way that will make them feel comfortable no matter their background, economic status, education, first language, or tech comfort level. Represent every unique situation for every possible user without the content becoming overwhelming.
The Process & Tools We Used
In a non-descript government building in the middle of an overcast January, eight team members representing the various website development functional capabilities - a back-end developer, a graphic designer, a front-end developer, two content subject-matter experts and three user-centered designers - were given a week to create the design documentation that would represent the user-facing portion of what was to become healthcare.gov - an ambitious project, years in the making that would familiarize users with the complexities of healthcare and shepherd them forward to ultimate coverage for millions of Americans.
Without the distractions of email or meetings and only a single goal in mind, we had several years of user research and subject matter expertise to draw from. We started, day one, by creating personas to make sure we understood our users. All of the team members - coming from different agencies and backgrounds - decided on day one that the project would always start and end with the user in mind. Whenever we deviated or disagreed on a path forward, we went back to those personas to remind ourselves who we were building the site for.
We focused on one user in particular; a single mother of two, healthy and employed, but uninsured and nervous about her future and the future of her children. We called her Sonya. She was our beacon.
The Solution
Immediately we started on breaking down a massive challenge into smaller components. We developed 3 “big ideas” to work from - helping the uninsured become insured; create a “ladder of engagement” that would get them there, and; build trust with transparency, plain language, and straightforward design.
From there we created 7 guiding principles. Each of the principles focused on some aspect of the user - integrating outreach plans; serving everyone from the young and healthy to the sick and worried, the tech savvy, the phone-only users, non-English speakers, and every education level; strict consumer-focused orientation; continuous outreach, testing, and improving; a friction-free architecture and content strategy ensuring a user could find what they need. Above all, returning to Sonya whenever we got stuck with a path forward.
That was day one. The rest of the week, we used these ideas and principles to develop content models and strategy, the visual design, the engagement strategy, the user experience and information architecture, interaction models, screen patterns, Search and Help strategies, and the development, infrastructure, and technology platforms we would need to support it all.
We missed our five-day deadline, but worked 15-hour days through the following weekend to create the Design Guidelines that would support the outward-facing engagement and education portion of the healthcare.gov website.
Value Added
The site was ultimately launched before the actual enrollment process began. The purpose of the site was to engage and inform. One of our “big ideas” was the Ladder of Engagement that would guide a user with Awareness, Education, Engagement, and ultimately, Enrollment. As designed, the site constantly tested and improved with constant feedback from users and updates to improve the usability of the site.
To this day, the user-facing portion of healthcare.gov continues to follow the core principles designed and developed in those 7 days with the core concept of user-first design still guiding its evolution.
