Introduction
Spot insurance is supplemental medical insurance specializing in injury claims. I was tasked with designing a straightforward process for submitting a claim.
Problem statement
When a patient visits the doctor after an injury they typically are not charged when they walk through the door. Instead, a week or more goes by and they get a bill in the mail. The customer then makes a claim in order to get their insurance to pay for the charge. This can often be a cumbersome task, but Spot Insurance will make this easy.
Roles and responsibilities
I acted as lead designer and researcher on this project. I was given a list of user requirements and minimal brand guidelines to create a seamless workflow.
Design Process
Sorting and mental models
Before I began mocking up potential solutions, I considered the required information for submitting a claim. I tried to build a credible mental model around how patients would categorize the information in a logical way. I settled upon the basic idea that information would be paired to 2 particular events. (1) The injury itself and (2) the doctor's visit. I later confirmed this model through user testing.
Testing with users
After creating some very basic mockups, I placed them in front of a few users to see if my assumptions on grouping were effective. At this phase, the fidelity was very low and I simply walked the testers through the process and recorded their feedback. Some of the more prominent findings are listed below:
More steps, less confusion
There were 2 primary findings that drove my next iteration of the design. First, I wanted to isolate one of the more complex steps - uploading your medical bill. Second, I found that including a smart search component for listing an injury could improve customer confidence and prevent errors.
I’ve reasoned that the first step would be to specify a type of injury from a searchable list of values - presumably, this selection could be used to customize the remaining data to be collected. Some workflows could be streamlined if the system recognizes the injury, saving time for the customer.
For the second step, I isolated the interaction for uploading the medical bill. In testing, I learned that placing this in a form produced anxiety for the user. Essentially they were afraid of losing their progress. I had also considered that the pdf could be scanned and auto-populate subsequent steps in the workflow.
Steps 3 and 4 collect the remaining details required to submit a claim and are organized by the initial mental model I hypothesized about.
Lastly, I included a summary page where the customer could review all that was entered before submitting the claim. This is an important inclusion for any workflow involving multiple steps as it provides a quick way to scan for errors before doing something that could be costly to get wrong.
Next Steps
The design covered here was done within a single design sprint for this workflow. It included one round of initial user testing, several design iterations, and the development of a mid-fidelity prototype.
The next steps for this project would be to do another round of testing with the prototype and to follow up with development on what streamlined workflows could be gained by collecting critical inputs earlier in the process.
