The Health Insurance Fund of Western Australia (or HIF) were looking to enhance their customer experience through more engaging content and a fresh coat of paint. Their previous design although effective, had become outdated. There was a chance to realign on the websites goals and take advantage the opportunity to make improvements not just on the website, but across the business.
The website refresh also coincided with updates to the HIF brand. The client still wanted to target its message towards the same audience, but in a different way. This influenced the updates to the site and ultimately guided me through this redesign process.
HIF was welcome to a large change to the look and feel of their brand, and this could be reflected on the site. Although a change was wanted, at this stage in the project this brand direction was not defined.
This lack of definition gave me a great amount of flexibility in the design process, allowing me to experiment and try some different directions. After meeting with the client I had a good idea of what success meant for this project, and it allowed me to start exploring the various options.
I took a number of directions with this project. However they all followed a similar theme. All designs were focussed on clarity, white space and simple ease of use.
Opportunities of improvement from the previous site design mainly revolved around these factors. I wanted users to have a clear path to their goals, and for them not to encounter any friction points in their path. I also did not want design elements to distract or overpower from our primary call to actions (CTA's) or focus points.
Often the primary challenge with any design project with HIF was how to organise and sort content. Health insurance in Australia is highly regulated and as a result website page copy and content can get complex fast. This results in the challenge of effectively displaying this content for users in a straight forward way that they can understand at a glance.
In particular, the product and product related pages were the most complex to design. They had multiple regulatory requirements and required to display a significant amount of information to users at once. The solution to these issues were researched and implemented on a case by case basis, but often it was a balancing act between white space, accordions and sticky elements on the page.
Page hierarchy was another important factor in the creation of these type of pages. A great deal of care had to be made in displaying the right information at the right time.
Outside of the website redesign, there were a number of other large scale projects that came my way to help improve conversion of the website. One project I was a part of was to redesign the onboarding and checkout user flows to improve conversion and cut back on the steps required to make a purchase.
This project required me to map out these user flows and create prototypes for pricing and checkout pages. These prototypes were fully interactive and provided us the opportunity to test many different hypothesis. After validating through these prototypes I created high fidelity mockups and eventually implemented the new flow and screens. The new flow reduced the number of steps to checkout, and made it much clearer to users their current position in the flow. A large amount of redundant information was emitted along the process, letting us display the relevant information clearer and with more emphasis.
With the updated design and other website improvements, members now have a resource that they previously didn't have, but needed. Users now can more easily access content, and have a better experience doing so.
Working on projects for HIF really allowed me to focus on results, and be hyper aware of how design impacts decisions online. Every change you make can have a drastic impact, and with HIF there were a number of opportunities to impact business objectives with design.
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