Unified Shopping Cart

Context: 

Via Benefits helps participants enroll in Medicare and Healthcare insurance plans through their online marketplace. We had three different platforms to fulfill these services.

Problem to be solved: 

In order to streamline user experience and maintain only one codebase, there was a large company initiative to merge these three experiences into one.

With three disparate tools, this created tech debt, duplicate work, and an inconsistent user experience. The three platforms included a PC desktop application, which thousands of Customer Service agents use daily to help enrollees, a Medicare website and an Individual Family Plan website which are both used by the general public and client employees.

My role:

I initially spent time to understand all three carts thoroughly, creating a features and functionality matrix from each cart, which I used as a baseline UX Requirements list. I also documented all the different personas and identified the different workflows. From that, I created low-fidelity annotated wireframes which I used to conduct research with Customer Service agents and the general public. Along the way I also spoke with Operations stakeholders in upper management to vet these features. From low fidelity wireframes, I then moved into high fidelity visual designs where I utilized our Design System and components. 

Key decisions & trade-offs:

Using the features and functionality matrix, I worked with internal stakeholders to identify which features of the three systems we should keep, based on regulatory needs, usage rates, technical bugs, usability and support calls.

Outcome:

This unified shopping cart was built as a modern React micro frontend and went live September 2020. This resulted in less tech maintenance, streamlined dev work, usability improvements, and a consistent user experience across tools.