Speaker Spotlight: Elizabeth Rosenzweig and The UX of Medicare

Elizabeth Rosenzweig will be returning to Big Design to talk about her experiences, as she performs a major project to overhaul the user experience of Medicare. The customers include doctors, insurance providers, patients, nursing homes, families, government agencies, and more. You will enjoy this talk, which will be extremely informative.

Elizabeth is the Executive Director of World Usability Day. She is a past President of the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA). Currently, she splits time teaching design and usability at Bentley University. You will find her speaking at many industry events. Plus, she is working on how to improve the UX of Medicare. Elizabeth explains it below.

Solving the Big Problem: The UX of Medicare

As the field of UX evolves, and we are presented with new challenges to create a better user experience, strategy becomes important. In order to be successful, we must be thinking of the big picture, and the road ahead. This presentation describes a successful case study of UX strategy using several UX tools and techniques to improve a section of Medicare.gov— nursing home compare, raising the quality of care in nursing homes, across the USA.

The case focuses on the development and execution of a user experience strategy for a website hosted on Medicare.com, and a subsequent rating system, displayed on the website. The strategy included an iterative model that was broken down into 5 phases and are described below.

Phase 1: Baseline Evaluation and First Round Strategic Model Development

The goal of this Phase is to lay the groundwork for the project. The first task was to better understand the current website and build a comprehensive strategic modelA competiteive analysis was done, as well as a review of the prior Expert Review and Usability test. The next step was to reviewing existing web analytics for the website, as well as similar rating systems. This phase also looked at recent research, such as Persuasive Technology that might be employed to further the mission and goals of project. By integrating this research, Phase 1 provided the framework for the next phases, described below.

Phase 2: Evaluate and Test website and the Rating System

This phase included user testing of new version of website to collect user feedback on the new design and the rating system. First Strategy model iterated using this new data.

Phase 3: Ongoing Online Survey

This phase launched on ongoing short popup survey to help answer the following questions:

What do consumers look for when researching nursing homes?
Do consumers understand the Medicare.gov rating system, and what do they use it for?
What is their overall level of satisfaction with the website, and where are the greatest opportunities to lift customer satisfaction?

Resultant data was used to again iterate the Strategic model.

Phase 4: Focus Groups

In Phase 4, focus groups among consumers and providers (in separate groups) to further the understanding of the issues and questions identified in Phase 3. The focus groups focused on the following issues:

Make informed choices about nursing homes
Articulate the kinds of information consumers want/need on the website to help inform their decision-making

This phase produced data that informed the website and produced new designs that can be used to obtain consumer feedback. We will conclude this phase by making recommendations for improved website design and functionality, based on data collected.

Phase 5: Finalize Strategic Model

The final phase integrated the data and design produced from the prior phases. This was delivered to the Medicare.gov who used it to improve the website and use it as a model for the many other websites that are hosted on Medicare.gov

Summary

A program as large as Medicare has many moving parts, creating a complex system that can be hard to understand and tough to use. The power of combining tools for collecting data at various stages of a project development provide a strong strategy for innovation and producing powerful results. In this case, Rating System used in conjunction with the improved website has helped Medicare.gov improve the quality of care, across the USA for nursing home.

For anyone interested in solving big problems, you should attend this talk. This is important work.

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