Inside our roadmap for creating an accessible and intuitive benefits-recommendation platform

Simplifying an experience that requires personalization down to an individual human level, while also being sufficiently flexible to address users of all backgrounds and segments is a uniquely challenging problem to solve. How do you build trust and influence with a user that is making one of their most impactful decisions of the year? How can you educate a user without overwhelming them with data?

Over the past 5+ months here at Nayya, we’ve been meticulously working on redefining our Choose product experience, a platform that helps personalize the way employees choose their health and wellness benefits. We’ve not only pondered some of the questions above but also focused on bringing real value to everyday consumers who struggle with their benefits — specifically, focusing on addressing the following issues:

• 96% of Americans don’t understand basic insurance terms like “deductible,” “co-pay,” and “out-of-pocket max”
• Half of American employees find making health decisions “very stressful”
• Over 75% of employers anticipate offering voluntary benefits like Accident Insurance, Hospital Indemnity Insurance, and Critical Illness plans by 2022

As you’ve seen from the above trends, our health-care and benefits decisions play a vital role in protecting our health and financial wellness. Personalization and accessibility are central to Nayya’s ethos. Being an organization that is dedicated to creating better financial outcomes for Americans of all backgrounds means that we have to design for inclusion and trust, regarding each and every interaction we have with our users.

Our belief in the power of personalization and data to create better decision-making guides our product and engineering efforts. To celebrate and share the story of our newly redesigned Choose product experience, we’ve compiled three themes that were fundamental to every design decision, from ideation to release.

Empathetic design requires robust user research

It wasn’t lost on us that in order to create better outcomes for Americans of all backgrounds — be it educational, professional, ethnic, or age — we had to be intentional and thoughtful about each design decision we made. This meant conducting rigorous user research that provided quantitative and qualitative feedback from real prospective users to drive how those experiences were designed.

At each juncture of our design process, we implemented a system of moderated and unmoderated user research studies, in which a representative sample of our user base was identified. During each user research study, participants were asked to record themselves and project their thoughts openly as they clicked through working prototypes of our product design.

These user research studies were especially effective in helping us decide between a number of different options for a given experience. Over the course of our design ideation, we conducted over 100 user research studies and hosted over 30 internal design-review sessions with stakeholders across our team.

Here are some of the key user-research inspired learnings that influenced our product design

**Users wanted a clearer understanding of what drove their bundled Benefits Recommendations **— this led to the development of our proprietary Scenario Engine. The Scenario Engine today is powered by dozens of health and life-event related scenarios that illustrate the associated out-of-pocket expenses a user would incur in the event of the given scenario. The scenarios are driven by average in-network costs for procedures based on the specific geography where the user resides. Today, the Scenario Engine helps users understand why Nayya’s Recommendations are important for providing the best health and financial outcomes for our users.

Users lost interest in learning about their benefits for longer than 14 minutes — this crucial fact made it clear that we had to design a streamlined and efficient user experience. So, we created a process that maximized value at each step with small things like clearer CTA buttons, automatic transitions from screen to screen, and easy-to-use hot keys. With these changes made, users are able to navigate the Choose experience in roughly 40% less time with 20% fewer “rage clicks.”

Users felt comfortable sharing data when they knew what they were getting in return — in order to convey the rationale for each piece of information we were requesting from our users, we built the “Benefits Checklist.” This is a dynamic list of benefits that answers specific questions, which we’ve found has increased the percentage of users that complete their experience end-to-end. Overall, our Product Engagement data shows that users are completing their experience from start to finish over 90% of the time.

Want to see what personalization for benefits looks like?