Health Insurance Portal for Employers

What is the Viva Health Employer Portal?

Viva Health is a health insurance provider based in Birmingham, Alabama. The Viva Health Employer Portal is a self service web application. Employers who provide Viva health insurance to their employees can log into the application, add employees to their group, make changes to benefit selections, and view plan details.

Problem

Until 2021, Viva Health did not have a web application where employers could access their plan information or self service to make changes to employees on their plan. Instead, they would have to reach out to Viva Health’s customer service team to make any changes. This had been an issue to employers who were used to being able to manage their plans online through previous health insurance providers. The demand for Viva Health to provide a self service platform steadily increased and even became a requirement from several potential customers.

Brainstorming

Because of the importance of this project, the Director of Software Application Development, the Senior Product Manager, and Subject Matter Experts for the Employer Portal began gathering requirements months before the rest of the team was brought onboard. After a solid foundation of product requirements had been created, the Scrum Master, Software Developers, and I were brought onto the project. My role was to design the Employer Portal and collaborate with the Subject Matter Experts as well as the Software Developers to deliver a quality self service application. I was not granted access to the external individuals who would be using the Employer Portal. Because of this, I relied heavily on the Subject Matter Experts, who communicated daily with the intended users of the Employer Portal, to help brainstorm and iterate on every step of the Employer Portal. I held frequent design review meetings with the Scrum Master and Subject Matter Experts to ensure that product requirements were being met and to gather feedback on design iterations.

Design

Viva Health’s brand guidelines were strict on what could and could not be done with brand colors, fonts, etc. Because a product designer had never been brought onto a Viva Health project before, I first started out by creating a UI kit based on the brand guidelines. From there, I began iterating on designs based on the user stories that had been provided. Health insurance is a complicated industry, and there were many difficult workflows I needed to create so the user could be more self sufficient in managing their plan. I also needed to design for multiple user personas (internal Viva users, employer admin users and non-admin employer users. During the design process, my focus was to provide the easiest and most straight forward user experience possible.

Results

After months of sprints and heavy collaboration between me, the Scrum Master, Developers and Subject Matter Experts, the Viva Health Employer Portal is now in beta testing. Currently, internal Viva Health team members are using the portal during their daily operations to perform tasks that the employer users will eventually be able to complete themselves. Once the leadership team is comfortable with releasing the Employer Portal to external users, a few specified employer groups will be given access to ensure the portal meets their needs. After this is confirmed, all employer groups will be provided with access to the Employer Portal. During beta testing, no major usability issues have been identified and several employer groups are anxiously awaiting their onboarding to the Employer Portal.

Additional Designs & Workflows