Visual Design for a Health Insurance Shopping Experience
Startup
Visual Design
B2C
Responsive Web
Overview
I spent late 2023 conducting product experiments on Stride's health insurance funnel with my cross-functional team. These experiments biased towards speed and testing. We deprioritized quality until we had confidence on the final solution. Low quality erodes trust, and we needed users to trust us. With a few months left before open enrollment, we focused on quality code and visual design.
Key Outcomes
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Launched to 100k new users
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Improved conversion by 5% after only 1 month
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Happy leadership team
About the Company
Stride helps 1099 workers navigate the complexities of being independent, providing software tools for finding the right health, dental, and vision insurance plans, for tracking finances, and planning for taxes.
My Roles
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Project Planning
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Research
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UI Design
Challenges & Opportunities
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70% of revenue comes from health insurance plans during Open Enrollment, only 2 months of the year
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Product experimentation enabled quick learning while deprioritizing quality
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I had a 2-week timeline to determine low-effort high-impact UI changes to implement prior to Open Enrollment
Pictured above: The 'before' version of Stride's health insurance shopping funnel with my markup
Key Decisions
Prioritization
The most important step was to prioritize design issues I had backlogged.
I gathered all feedback and markup items into Trello and met with my Product Manager and Engineering Lead to discuss each item, the value, and effort. We categorized each card into phases. Phase 1 items were high-value items that could be completed within 2 sprints and did not require additional requirements gathering. Anything else was placed in either Phase 2 or Phase 3.
Cohesive template
A high-priority high-value issue planned for Phase 1 was to redesign the template that all pages would follow. I rapidly iterated as many ideas I could think of, good and bad, with the following goals in mind:
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Integrate Stride's new brand identity, including color, font, and company mark
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Improve visual balance, including spacing, white space, and alignment
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Simple enough to not blow up
Outcomes
CR Improved from 59% to 64%
One month after launch, we had early signal that improving our visual design quality had a significant impact on user behavior.
Happy Leadership Team
Marketing, customer success, and product leads were all very happy with the quick changes prior to Open Enrollment.
