I had the opportunity to lead Design in the redesign of BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee’s flagship mobile app. Launched in August of 2021, The new experience and has won over X awards and offers more than 3 millions members a new way to engage with BlueCross.
Process
Discover
Kicking off this initiative the UX research team facilitated an ideation workshop – bringing in company stakeholders to generate ideas on how BlueCross can improve it’s digital experiences. Moderated user interviews were conducted – tasking participants to navigate the current mobile app experience. We received over 20 detailed studies breaking down user expectations and preferences in the health insurance industry. Competitor research gave us an idea of the best in class experiences across the health insurance and similar industries.
Define
A core team consisting of Product, Design, and UX coalesced around the project – first bringing in the mobile app development team to organize the output of the stakeholder workshop – prioritizing features based on their feasibility and impact. User personas were then developed from the moderated user studies to assist the creation of a story map of all the user journeys and flows throughout the experience. Design principles were created to anchor us to our members core needs and guide us as we began our ideation.
Create
A design workshop was held splitting groups into rotating pairs of two – sketching user flows for each story. Design then synthesized the sketches into wireframes and low-fidelity prototypes and worked with UX to further refine the information architecture with usability tests and card sorting exercises.
Test
Once a stable mid-fidelity prototype mapping out the majority of the user experience emerged. The design team took to refining the experience by systematically breaking down all UI patterns into a core foundational design language utilizing atomic methodology – generating documentation around use cases for each pattern and its corresponding principles, attributes and use-cases.
Diverging stylistic approaches were conceived and A-B tests performed to further narrow user expectations and preferences in the experience – converging all feedback into a single prototype and product vision.
Stakeholder roundtables were held with a great deal of excitement as the teams were finally able to share all our work and progress through the rigorous process.
Develop
Development began at once digesting the documentation as we further fleshed out our design language with micro-interaction animations, edge cases, and error / success states and worked with the marketing design team to converge the product vision with member communications – notifying members that a new mobile app experience was now available to all.