AARP Medicare Enrollment Guide
Role: UI, Visual, and Interaction
Duration: August 2020 - June 2021
The Medicare enrollment guide is an education and decision support tool that provides a clear learning plan, straightforward content, decision guidance, and personalized next steps. The goal was to see how AARP can help people to prepare for their initial enrollment into Medicare sooner and more thoroughly so consumers might have increased confidence, peace of mind, and satisfaction with their decisions.
Challenge
How might we ensure people are better prepared and have better outcomes when enrolling in Medicare for the first time?
Research Insights
As part of the discovery phase, I worked closely with the research team to learn more about our users' needs and behavior. Through a series of surveys and diary studies, data analysis, and user interviews the team created a user journey map. We discovered the following insights:
People need a Medicare education experience now
People mistake choosing a plan as the starting point and need to be reoriented
Structure and guidance differentiate the experience and make it effective
People need to know the pitfalls and potential outcomes of their decisions
They need next steps, not plan offerings, complete the experience
AARP is expected to deliver this experience
The team decided to create an isolated learning experience with a set of features that were needed to help users understand and lighten the cognitive load when making decisions about medicare.
With the set of features outlined, I set out to create low-fidelity mockups which we would use for usability tests.
Iteration
Based on the usability study, we made slight adjustments to the checklist and landing page.
Takeaways
Creating the features for Medicare Enrollment, I learned that small design changes can have a huge impact on the user experience. Conducting usability tests on the different interactions highlighted how people expected features to behave and allowed for a more usable experience.
Impact
The experience has allowed people to feel more confident when deciding to enroll by the feedback received in the experience and has seen an increased engagement with the experience.
