At eHealth we have a very transactional engagement with our customers. We recommend health plan options, they choose, they enroll and that's it. Thinking about the future for eHealth we wanted to become more than an e-commerce site for health insurance. We wanted to have better engagement with customers and increase customer retention.
eHealth Medicare Blog
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Role
Product Designer -
Duration
2 Months -
Cross-Team
Product Marketing
Project Goal
Increase customer engagement that will lead to retention outside of our current channels, while acquring new customers through this new channel.
Solution
Create a Medicare related blog platform that focuses people's health. The place to read contents about everything and anything related to the on-going Pandemic in 2020, healthy lifestyle tips, finances and recipes. And of course how to use or signup for Medicare.
Process
Market Research
The main internal stakeholder for this project was our Product Marketing team. They would own this product and produce the content. They came to the design team with results and findings from a research they conducted about what content would help us with our goals. With that research, we established the main categories for the blog.
Analysis and Cross Functional Collboration
There were multiple design disciplines involved in this project including Branding, Marketing, Content and Product. We all collectively brought our blog inspirations to the table. We had a vision of what our blog would look like. As the lead product designer on this project it was my job to organize all of the ideas. This helped in prioritization on features based on must haves and nice to haves.
Mobile First
Data shows that most of our users are on their mobile phones when they visit our medicare website. We took this information and assumed our users that will visit the blog would also be on mobile phones. Creating the blog on a desktop and tablet were secondary, however we made sure that the experience on any device is the same, like showing the Featured Content, filtering or searching posts.
Blog Posts
The turnaround time for this project felt short as there were many stakeholders involved. To push this project along, we wanted to focus on the main part as to not block the other teams, in this case the Content Marketing team. We wanted to put priority on getting the blog post designs done, so that they would be able to start producing content.
Components
I was very particular in building these pages in modules. Since it is a blog, we wanted to reuse elements in different parts of the site. My intention for these components was to make it flexible that a blog post can be unique, but are able to be reused modules so that we do not need engineering resources for each blog post. For example, We can always have a 2 column component where the user can interchange if the image goes on the right, copy is on the left or vice versa.
Engineering Kickoff
With the engineering team present in our design reviews we made sure we didn't forget the two most important things that matter to them, the components and load times. We established the components as I mentioned. For image load times, we worked with the content team to make sure we were strategic in where we were putting images in the post. I created 3 templates to show the diferent ways we can use these components.
Development
Engineering Hand-off
Once we got the designs signed off by all stakeholders it was ready for the engineering team. Similar to components being used by the content marketing team, the designs that were handed off to the engineering team had to have flexible UI components. I created a components page for engineers to make it easier for them to implement maximum and minimum dimensions.
Making sure that components are also robust, I created different componernts with variances. In this example we created thumbnail component where there is an image and what it will looks like without an image, which was a very common use case. Images might not load properly, devices might have the reading mode on or simply, there was no image to begin with.
Design Support
There were 3 developers that were working on developing the components. Simultaneously, the content team started creating posts that will be ready during the release. I was supporting both teams for specifications like character counts and image dimensions.
Takeaways
Personally, my takeaway is that even though the golden rule is to design mobile first, sometimes you need to see the desktop version as well before you can call the designs done.
For design reviews, know and understand your audience and decide which type of fidelity you need to show. Showing multiple options to stakeholders is a good start to having good and effective discussions during reviews. Making sure all the options solve the right problem so that whatever the team decides on, it is the right one.