One-Stop Benefits Portal
I led a cross-functional team to reimagine an employee benefits portal, driving brand engagement and creating a unified hub for managing health and retirement benefits.
Situation
During the discovery process for re-imagining an employee health and retirement benefit portal, a need emerged from the product and marketing teams. They wanted to drive the company's brand awareness. Many benefit-related communications and interactions were coming from the benefit vendors themselves, directing users to their secure sites. The goal was to drive more members to sign into the company's portal and connect email, print, and social media marketing about the value of using individual benefits with rich information from the company.
As the UX manager, my role was to facilitate conversations between the cross-functional team that included product and marketing stakeholders, UI and UX designers, engineers, and content developers. I led ideation sessions to brainstorm solutions that could address the organization's need for increased brand awareness and member engagement. Additionally, I coordinated the prioritization efforts and roadmap planning to ensure a smooth transition to the new portal experience.
As the UX manager, my role was to facilitate conversations between the cross-functional team that included product and marketing stakeholders, UI and UX designers, engineers, and content developers. I led ideation sessions to brainstorm solutions that could address the organization's need for increased brand awareness and member engagement. Additionally, I coordinated the prioritization efforts and roadmap planning to ensure a smooth transition to the new portal experience.
Task
- The UX team facilitated ideation sessions with cross-functional stakeholders (engineers, security, and product teams) to brainstorm solutions addressing the marketing need for increased brand awareness and member engagement.
- One proposed solution was creating a centralized dashboard/homepage aggregating benefit information from various vendors. This would allow members to access all accounts and details in one place.
- The key requirements were incorporating near-real-time account/balance data, single sign-on for partner vendors, and providing a single entry point. This dashboard would drive engagement by connecting marketing efforts while giving members convenient access to benefits and vendor sites..
Action
- The UX team worked closely with engineers to understand the technical feasibility of integrating with multiple vendor systems and retrieving real-time data feeds.
- They also consulted with the security team to ensure that the proposed solution met all necessary data privacy and security requirements, particularly regarding single sign-on functionality and handling sensitive financial information.
- Collaborating with the engineering and security teams, the UX team refined the dashboard concept, incorporating their feedback and constraints into the design.
- Reviewed member sign-in and page traffic data to rank the top benefits accessed and identify which vendors to prioritize.
- Developed a roadmap for the iterative rollout of the new functionality, considering the marketing calendar and highly trafficked information.
- Conducted usability testing on a prototype of the new portal with a dashboard and widget-based design for the homepage.
- Implemented the new design, displaying all benefits on day one and adding detailed information and single sign-on functionality iteratively over a few months, based on the established prioritization.
Result
- The one-stop-shop approach, where members could sign in once and access current benefit and account details, as well as vendor sites without additional sign-ins, was successful.
- Navigation gains were realized as users navigated the site via the widgets.
- This setup allowed marketing to create communications that drove engagement in benefits and the ability to communicate about multiple related benefits in one message (e.g., "use your FSA to pay for your dental bill").
- First-click homepage testing validated the effective use of the widget content.
- Bonus: The widgets could be used on other pages for marketing purposes, such as visualizing progress toward earning wellness dollars and account balances on related benefit content pages.