Anthem Blue Cross of California Website Optimization

Design Problem

According to a 2023 report by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, mental health care remains inaccessible and unaffordable for many people, even those with comprehensive health insurance coverage. This multifaceted issue is important to address because the lack of access to care impacts the nearly 60 million Americans living with mental illnesses.

With this in mind, I sought to redesign the website of Anthem Blue Cross of California. I asked myself, "How might we streamline the process of finding a mental healthcare provider who meets a user's needs?"

The answer lay in designing a user-friendly resource that allows users to quickly find and connect with a suitable mental healthcare professional.

Final Design Solution

Above are the final wireframes I created, with annotations in green text to facilitate developer hand-off. This redesign streamlines the provider search process, incorporating user insights to ensure users are able to efficiently find and establish care with a mental healthcare provider.

Note that, as I do not have access to Anthem's icons, the homepage is intentionally sparse. This is a design limitation by which I was constrained. However, the minimalist and intuitive user interface supports users' goals, as I elaborate on in the sections that follow.

Generative User Research

The foundation of my redesign was user research. To better understand the issues users faced, I conducted a survey with over 25 participants. I asked questions such as:

• Which service(s) did you use to find the most recent mental health professional with whom you worked? Select all that apply.

• Which of the following do/did you take into consideration when most recently finding a new mental health professional to work with? Select all that apply.

• Which of the following barriers to mental healthcare access have you faced when most recently finding a provider? Select all that apply.

Users' insights, shared not only through multiple choice questions but also through free-response answers, helped me prioritize high-impact features in a fast-paced course and rationalize design and content decisions.

User Research Analysis

I created a spreadsheet from the survey responses, cleaning up the data by standardizing free-response answers to streamline the visualization of the data with graphs. I gleaned the following insights:

• Providers sought: Most users are seeking to work with a psychologist or a psychiatrist.

• Treatments sought: Most users are seeking psychotherapy or medication management.

• Services used: Most users find providers through a direct referral from a primary care provider, or through a web search or a referral from a friend or family member. When it comes to digital resources, users prefer using their insurance website or the Psychology Today directory.

• Considerations: When finding a provider, most users take into consideration the specific type of treatment the provider uses, the dollar amount the provider charges per session, whether the provider accepts the user's insurance, and the location of the provider's office relative to their home location.

• Barriers faced: Most users face insufficient insurance coverage and an inability to find an in-network provider.

User Persona

I synthesized my research findings into a user persona, which helped me keep my designs user-centered. When I made adjustments to my design solutions, I ensured each one would help the typical user navigate the provider search process by asking myself, "Does this adjustment help Samara [my user persona] achieve her goals?"

Competitive Analysis

I compared Anthem Blue Cross with the Psychology Today directory and synthesized key learnings I could bring into my redesign. In particular, I adapted Psychology Today's robust set of filters for treatment type and clinical specialty, as well as filters for age of population served and price per session, into my design. I also added the contact information for providers to the content when refining the content design.

User Journey

Based off of the user persona, I created a user journey map to visualize the flow a typical user would work through to find a mental healthcare provider.

I conducted original research on the workflow by acting as a typical user and going through the workflow on the Anthem Blue Cross website, and by adding on a step from the Psychology Today directory (establishing care) to conclude the flow in alignment with the learnings from my competitive analysis. Leaning on the qualitative user insights helped me ideate about the users' thoughts and feelings at each step of the flow.

Wireframing

Based off of the steps in the user journey, I created high-fidelity Figma wireframes that included filters for price per session on a sliding scale, treatment types, and clinical specializations, in addition to options to show only in-network providers, only providers accepting new patients, and only providers offering telemedicine.

User Testing

I conducted evaluative testing to further refine my wireframes. From three rounds of moderated user testing, I gleaned the following insights:

• Credentials: Include more information in provider profile: education, major if medicine-related, where they completed residency.

• Improved security

• Include text boxes for user's phone number and email address on the Contact Provider page.

• Authenticate phone number/email address prior to sending a provider a message.

• Book appointment

  • Provide users with an option to book an appointment with a chosen provider (include a calendar with open appointment times for the chosen week).

  • Sometimes users want to message a provider with a question, sometimes they just want to book an appointment, so having both a “Book Appointment” and a “Message Provider” option would be ideal.

These insights led me to add more functionality to my designs and to refine the design of web content.

Conclusion

If I had more time and access to official resources from Anthem Blue Cross of California, such as an internal style guide and iconography library, I would integrate these into my high-fidelity wireframes and a robust prototype that I could then use for unmoderated user testing on a dedicated platform such as UserTesting.

Even with the constraints of this project in mind, I still was able to gather actionable insights and optimize the website for the user flow of finding and establishing care with a suitable mental health provider.

Indeed, Anthem Blue Cross of California updated their site soon after I completed this redesign project. They added features to the provider search results page such as:

• Notation of the price per session

• Filters for sub-specialty and areas of expertise

These updates align with my design solution, which includes a robust array of filters and copy that clearly denotes the price per session for providers. Anthem Blue Cross's update not only validates my solution, but also represents an important step towards embracing user-friendliness and usability in the digital design of healthcare resources.