eHealth Online

Like a leaky bucket being carried across a room, every digital user journey has points where users encounter friction and leave—often right after you paid to acquire them through marketing or after you worked hard to attract them organically. The more holes you patch, the more users make it to where you are trying to take them. Opportunities for improvement are everywhere if you know where and how to look for them.

Over the past 5+ years my team has made dozens of site improvements—from where the user lands on our site, to how they find health insurance plans that meet their needs, and eventually to how they enroll in that specific plan. Complicating things further—we had to do this across both mobile and desktop experiences, because users' needs and behaviors are different across these device form-factors. We have been able to 3x site conversion by identifying and prioritizing the biggest opportunities.

Finding leaks

The more tools and data sources you use to uncover opportunities for improvement, the better. But leveraging them effectively takes hard work—and it’s never a one-person job.

The data needed is both qualitative and quantitative: User research, page level analytics, user session recordings, past a/b testing results, heat maps, competitive analysis, and site surveys. It helps to identify and focus on one prominent user type, documenting that one experience from end to end, overlaying any and all data and insights you have. If you are also able to do a full journey mapping exercise with these key personas, the biggest pain-points will surface quickly. To discover the smaller points of friction will take the collaborative effort of Product Designers, Product Managers, Content Designers, and Data Analysts.

Below I will highlight a few of the site improvements we made.

Top of the funnel

We designed and built out a platform for entry pages using a headless Wordpress instance that has allowed us to create a library of page modules and components that we are able to configure in numerous ways (think lego blocks) to develop pages for specific audiences and campaigns.

On these landing pages we have baked in dynamic elements that deliver a customized marketing message for each user's state and ZIP code, and echo the value proposition the user saw on the advertisement.

We are also able to dynamically toggle on/off telephone numbers, so that when we have spare capacity in our telephonic sales center we can drive more phone calls, and we are able to do this without hurting site conversion.

Plan shopping: Tools and layout

In order to make the best plan recommendation to our users we need some information from them about which doctors and drugs should be covered by a new plan. In our testing, users were always overly confident that if we just showed them all of the plans they could figure out which would be best for them, but the reality was that after 5 or 10 minutes users would be overwhelmed by the number of plans available and the complexity of distinguishing which would meet their needs best.

We knew that users that provided doctor and drug information converted at twice the rate of folks that didn’t, so we were constantly trying new ways to encourage people to use the tools that allowed them to supply this info. Again, the reality was that users that navigate to these tools are just higher intent and would likely convert at a higher level anyway (correlation vs. causation) and encouraging tool usage had diminishing returns.

When we moved the shopping filters from being vertical on the left-side of the page to horizontal across the top of the page above the plans, conversion went up 15% because they were more discoverable by the user.

Another big win came from encouraging plan comparison through the plan card design and page layout. We moved from a vertically stacked plan card to a smaller side-by-side plan card that allowed the user to view three plans right next to each other as they scrolled down the page and enabled them to flag plans that peaked their interest. Simplifying the card information through user testing and A/B testing enabled us to figure out what plan data was critical on this page and what could wait for the plan details page.

Enrollment

Once a user found the plan they thought was best for them they then had to enroll in that plan by filling out an application that is sent to the insurance carrier. State and federal laws required that we follow the exact question order and wording of a paper application the carrier submitted for approval, so we were very limited in what we could actually change.

That said—we were able to optimize the UX by breaking up the application into a few pages, making it feel more manageable to the user, introducing helper text to explain confusing insurance jargon, simplifying selections inputs, and leveraging auto-fill functionality that improved speed through the form and accuracy of the information.

Patched leaks

Through our testing and site improvements across the user journey we had several step-function increases in conversion, but a lot of results came from hard fought tweaks and tests that reduced a few clicks here or removed unnecessary friction there that enabled the user to more freely accomplish their goals. Throughout our testing we looked at page level metrics and overall conversion to be sure any improvements we made in one area weren't harming us somewhere else.

One additional thing I would mention is that we spent a lot of time working on the desktop and mobile experiences separately because what worked on one almost never worked on the other, so the two experiences diverged when needed. In the end—simplicity, removing unnecessary clicks and elements, removing distractions, and diligently following the data enabled us to find success.