makeover

Channelpoint

In 2000, we were called in to be the interface designers with a group of other experts on this project, including visual designers and usability professionals. Channelpoint was a site designed by Aetna to help people select a health insurance policy. We first studied the existing HTML-based application and found that it took 9-10 steps before users were presented with several health plans from which to choose (you can click on the window to see it full size):

Original Design (click to enlarge)

The user is supposed to select the best health care plan from this page for their needs and then proceed to the next step. We found that this interface just didn't support that task, so we proposed a new one:

Proposed Redesign, without artwork (click to enlarge)

This new design was created in a graphically sparse demo to illustrate key elements of the interaction design:

Available plans appear across the top, rather than down the sides. There are typically only a handful of available plans, but often dozens of attributes to compare.
Attributes, such as copayments, appear down the side.
The most favorable number is highlighted in blue in this example. So, the best premium of $2,348.11 appears in blue in the upper left area of the table.
We added a dropdown menu that allows the user to switch between different types of comparisons and decide how to sort the information.

All of these changes were designed to support the user's task: picking the best overall plan. We also worked with the graphic artists on this project to take this graphically sparse mockup and add visual design to it:

Proposed Redesign, with artwork (click to enlarge)

In addition to work on this one screen, we also worked on the design of the others. We reduced the number of steps from over a dozen to 4-6 steps and developed a dynamic system for changing requirements (such as a copayment) and seeing a change in the number of available plans.

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