Redesigning Medicare.gov’s Plan Details
UX, VISUAL DESIGN, WORKSHOP FACILITATION, STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT
Choosing a Medicare plan can overwhelm people. It determines how much they’ll pay for healthcare and what kind of care they’ll receive for the next year. This huge choice comes involves many variables that Medicare beneficiaries must consider: the plans available in their area, their budgets, plan benefits, drug costs for their prescriptions.
One of the simpler tables on the Plan Details pages, an overview of the plan’s most important figures
Framing the problem
By the time beneficiaries are nearly ready to enroll in a Medicare plan, they’re looking for granular details on the plans they’re considering. On the Plan Details page, one of the last steps before enrollment, beneficiaries look at costs in context: will this plan cover my needs and fit my budget? How will my drug costs and premiums and deductibles shake out for the rest of the year?
The result is an overwhelming amount of information—pages filled with cost figures, tables, and estimates. Healthcare is complicated and requires lots of context for plans to make sense.
Why this project?
CMS heard from research participants and stakeholders that the Plan Details page needed a more intuitive structure and more transparent, accurate drug costs to help beneficiaries make these pivotal decisions.
An early prototype for a potential Plan Details design and structure
CMS made revising the Plan Details page a priority, but what exactly would a redesign of such an important page look like? What worked for beneficiaries now? Was there any data missing that beneficiaries looked for? What kind of pain point are Medicare beneficiaries running into at this point in the workflow?
To better define what problems we wanted to solve, I developed a remote UX workshop. I led this workshop as a kickoff for the Plan Details project with the guidance and participation of stakeholders, product team members, researchers, and fellow designers.
Together, we defined the biggest obstacles on the Plan Details page today using an online whiteboard. Drug pricing and navigation had the biggest potential for improvements, so we made them top priorities. In a second remote workshop, we brainstormed how we might improve the presentation of drug pricing, navigation, structure, and content to make it more accessible for beneficiaries. These workshops were extremely valuable, leaving the design team with a grouping of prioritized ideas.
Next, I worked to make sense of the basic concepts and how we might keep them in balance with the real-world constraints we have.
Problems with the original Plan Details page, which we sorted by importance
I led a workshop session where the team mapped out possibilities for the top priorities on Plan Details
The Plan Details page was complex (it has to show all the information for a healthcare plan, which as many Americans know, plans are complicated and nuanced). There were hundreds of data points and numerous tables to display.
I considered what a user would want to see first when they arrive at this page as a starting point and used a popular information-filtering approach the Medicare.gov team calls “bite, snack, meal.” The bite is a small chunk of information, the snack gives the user a little more detail, while the meal includes all the detailed information the user needs. With this approach, I developed a new UI concept called the “What You’ll Pay” bar—a quick glance place for beneficiaries to consider the recurring costs of that plan.
Variations on a key feature, the “What You’ll Pay” bar
We moved through our ideation phase at a rapid pace. I wireframed low-fidelity and exploratory concepts and shared them with our team so we could collaboratively poke holes, capture any concerns, and progress while accounting for constraints. Constraints, even when not an ideal (ex: the data comes from two places and has two different labels that don’t match up), shape projects from beginning to end and this project had many.
To account for stakeholder anxieties over change (because change can be scary), I used a levels-of-change framing to develop three clear concepts to discuss with leadership:
Low change: same navigation structure, with the same tables but reordered + costs by pharm
Medium change: same navigation structure, what you’ll pay card, same tables reordered + costs by pharm
Highest change: new navigation structure, what you’ll pay, same tables reordered + costs by pharm
The stakeholders approved the highest level of change. The earlier workshops likely helped set this project up for success, because our team was able to build rapport with everyone who cared about a successful redesign and capture their impressive ideas and expertise at the beginning. With approval, we were set to build out the new Plan Details!
Documentation was a massive task. The design, engineering, and product teams collaborated to choose a MURAL board to host our specs and mock-ups. We wanted a living, breathing document to account for any possible tweaks or stress cases that might’ve showed up as the team worked through it.
The conclusion
If I had a chance to go through this project again, I would push for increased internal communication. I would want direct access to those in higher leadership positions to reassure them that unknowns are part of a solid design process. At times throughout this project, I heard from other stakeholders about aversion to change, but I was not able to speak directly with the decision-makers about their concerns.
I would also want an even more collaborative design process with our government stakeholders. My favorite parts of this project were in the discovery phase, when a diverse group of us collaborated together. If we were able to loop everyone in and involve them in the design process, we might have accounted for issues much earlier in the process and delivered this project quicker and more efficiently.
First glance at the Plan Details view for a Medicare Advantage plan in California
Demo-ing the new tabbed navigation, which highlights the section a user is viewing and allows users to jump to other sections
🎉 The Plan Details page is now live on Medicare.gov!
To view it, you need to be a Medicare beneficiary completing the enrollment process to select a plan and view its full details.