Company: Walmart
Project: Benefits Hub
Deliverables: Research report, IA, Wireframes, Visual Design
My Role: UX Architect and Visual Designer
UX CASESTUDY
BACKGROUND
Walmart and its health plan administrators offer multiple tools to equip employees to spend less on medical and prescription drug expenses while promoting quality of healthcare apps and website contacts.
PROBLEM
Some of these tools are available as websites and others are apps. If the employee is eligible for benefits, they can go to Fidelity’s netbenefits.com site to manage their HSA. Some require logins and profiles. The biggest challenge came to light in a recent employee survey is that the majority of employees don’t know about these tools and much less use them.
The company and employees are paying for these tools which can improve their experience by helping them spend less, have support when they need it and make their lives easier. The company sees increased use of some tools when they issue a communication, they want to create something that will promote employee awareness and use all of the time, whenever and wherever employees would benefit from cost, quality or benefits information.
SOLUTION
To create an intuitive, employee-centric mobile application and microsite that points to tools/features that can help employees save money on health care, save time navigating health care, and get the support and quality care needed.
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A mobile-first microsite that takes the complexity out of using consumerism tools
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No login/security for front-end
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Link to 7 vendors’ sites and/or apps – Healthcare Bluebook, Navitus, Novixus mail order, Teladoc, Best Doctors, Aetna, BCBS -- that may/may not require login
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Scalable as new tools are added and with an eye towards how this would evolve/fit into a comprehensive, secure employee portal with single sign-on in the future
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Create a theme and look/feel that engages employees and may (or may not) be leveraged in the future for the larger personalized portal and across other online resources (benefits Intranet and enrollment site)
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Define and guide testing of proposed navigation that should be as intuitive as an ATM
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Provide guidance and possibly creative development (campaign theme, visual elements, and content) for a comprehensive change management strategy to promote the tool’s launch and use
OBJECTIVES
Short-term: To promote employee and covered dependent awareness and use of health care consumerism tools.
Long-term: To create a portal, with a single sign-on, that delivers a customized experience to help employees and covered dependents make the most of their Praxair benefits, resources and support.
SHORT TERM SUCCESS MEASURES
Improve the employee experience and engagement stemming from health care cost savings and support as measured by ongoing usage of HealthCare Bluebook, Teladoc, Best Doctors and Navitus tools. This will help build the business case for the longer-term solution of an integrated, personalized portal.
THE PROCESS
Experience taught me that great projects are the result of an iterative process. As there were no time constraints for this project, it was an advantage and easier to implement the following process:
In order to measure the impact of the solution that we build, I decided to research the wide range of problems. A research report was created based on the findings of the company, culture, competitors, brand personality, industry practices, design style, and current trends. Following methods were used for collecting data:
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HR Interviews
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Online Research
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Online Survey
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Collective discussions
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Analyses of benefits documents
CLIENT AND INDUSTRY RESEARCH
A detailed User Research was conducted in order to understand the behaviors of Walmart employees, their needs, and motivations. The main focus was to understand the user needs, personality, capabilities, web behavior, infrastructure, barriers, and interaction pattern. Following methods were used for collecting data:
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In-depth User Interviews
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Developed personas
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Scenario-based testing
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In-depth User Interviews
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Developed user journey map
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Field survey​​​
Core findings:
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About 70% of benefits-eligible employees do not have access to a computer at work or Walmart-paid phone.
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With so many resources, it’s a challenge for any employee to remember individual tool names, URLs, purpose, value, etc.
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The majority of employees make benefit decisions with a spouse/partner (who can’t access information behind our company firewall)
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Primary Persona:
USER RESEARCH
CARD SORTING, MIND MAP & IA
Based on the research and findings the solution was discovered and sealed, which is to create a simple and easy to use microsite and mobile app. I wanted to keep the IA of the microsite and the app closer as it correlates with each other. For determining the IA, card sorting technique was used because it was the best place to start as everything is being done from scratch as it’s a new product. The initial plan was to use open card sorting by giving the freedom to the participants to sort cards into categories that make sense to them and label each category themselves. But more than half of the participants were the stakeholders from Walmart and they were not 100% sure about all the vendor Apps and it’s functions. So we, who have thorough subject matter knowledge had to help them with categories by slowly shifting to closed card sorting. In the end, we learned that in order to focus on how the users understand and group the information, we wanted to create a tailor the best user experience for the users. So we finally ended up doing a hybrid card sorting in which the participants did sort cards into categories we give them, and created their own categories as well. That was the right technique to adopt in this project as gathering high-quality relevant data was very important to make design decisions.
WIREFRAMES
I created wireframes for desktop microsite and mobile screens. Through the wireframes, I was able to design user flows, navigation, and interactions. I also provided a PDF document with annotation for clarity and technical details. After creating the rough sketches, the content strategists provided content which could undergo further edits changes. The collaboration with the content strategists was helpful to determine what content should be available on each page. Low fidelity wireframes were created with better content structure, layout and interaction patterns for every unique screen. Prototypes were created to test the designers before showing the first draft to the client.
VISUAL DESIGN
ANALYTICS & USABILITY TESTING
Worked closely with the analytics team to help them understand which areas of the experience need the richest analytical information about. Minor tweaks were made based on the analytical revelations.