Delta Dental - Member Portal

P R O D U C T D E S I G N E R

Delta Dental’s Member Portal

During a design sprint for Member Benefits with 18 cross-functional partners, we worked toward the goal of creating a valuable experience through a self-service portal that offers a clear summary of benefits, helping members better understand their coverage. Generative and evaluative research conducted during the sprint revealed that many of our customers have an incomplete understanding of their benefits.

Problem

Members don't know where to go to find details surrounding their benefits and covered procedures.

67% of users are not able to find the info they need online

----

45% of those users were searching for their benefits

22% were searching for info surrounding their benefits

Solution

EMPATHIZE

Understanding customers’ wants, needs, and expectations

While leading these sessions for the cross-functional team, my strategy was to foster alignment while preventing premature solutioning.

Building on our initial one-week sprint, we embarked on an intensive two-week research sprint to thoroughly understand pain points and identify ways to address them. Our methods included heuristic analysis, competitive analysis, and interviews with call center managers and users.

Through our research, we identified key insights that validated our initial hypothesis:

1. Many users overlook the "Get ID card" and "Find a dentist" options

2. Users call the support center to obtain information about specific procedures

3. Users must click 4 times to access relevant information, often getting lost in the process

CONCEPTUALIZE

Overwhelmed with insights, we began prioritizing and shaping our design strategy

After affinity mapping and prioritizing insights, our team conducted a research debrief with stakeholders. We aligned on business goals for the Member Portal and ensured that the design opportunities provided value by balancing user needs with business objectives, ultimately shaping our MVP.

Given the quick turnaround and technical constraints, including an evolving platform for member benefits and a still maturing design system, we needed to clearly define our scope. I led a workshop that included several collaborative exercises to help the team align on requirements, key performance indicators, and constraints.

This workshop included exercises like Who? What? When? Where? Why? and the Lean UX Canvas, which guided us towards the following statement:

Delta Dental members need easy access to their benefits, a clear understanding of the Member Portal, and the ability to look up their benefits by name and procedure code. This ensures they feel confident about their coverage for upcoming appointments or procedures.

KPIs:

Behavioral - Task success rate

Attitudinal - CSAT Score

DESIGN

Workflow mapping

My approach to exploration was to gain a full understanding of how we could improve the interactions on our Member Portal. I first focused on enhancing the user flow to establish clear entry and interaction points. To support this, I created a workflow map to define the design direction and ensure alignment with my cross-functional team and stakeholders.

V1.1 Exploration: Homepage re-organization

Taking a broad approach, I aimed to understand how users perceived the homepage layout as a whole. Through concept testing, we discovered that many aspects of the current homepage were valuable to users. Moving forward, we focused on retaining what worked, improving what didn’t, and implementing a well-received search feature.

V1.2 Exploration: Benefit Search flow - entry points and results

While working within Delta Dental’s design system and overall interface and mindful of tight deadlines, I explored different placement options, entry points, and display formats for a search feature on both the homepage and the Benefits Details page. A/B testing and surveys revealed that users found the placement unintuitive and that presenting search results disrupted the page, making them difficult to process.

V1.5 Exploration: Benefit Search Flow - Plan Summary Section and Tooth Code

V2.0 Member Portal homepage

V1.1 0 - V1.5 Optimizing for mobile

While implementing and testing Benefit Search, we simultaneously explored ways to optimize for mobile. Early generative research revealed that an increasing number of users check their benefits on the go.

Balancing both initiatives, I collaborated closely with the Junior Product Designer to ensure alignment and a unified approach. Our primary focus was optimizing above the fold, allowing users to see the most relevant information upfront.

V2.0 Optimizing for mobile

IMPACT

Learnings

What would I have done differently?

Given the tight deadlines and the complexity of managing feedback from stakeholders and cross-functional teams, I found myself wishing I had more time to spend in the exploratory phase, which happens to be one of my favorite parts of the design process.

In hindsight, I would have explored adding badges to Benefit Search results to see if they could have fit within the previous MVP.

1. Explore adding badges to Benefit Search results to display coverage details upfront, reducing clicks and improving efficiency.

2. Optimize the Benefit Details page for a better user experience.

3. Conduct A/B testing for the Oral Code search option.