| Experience design – Cigna, 2021 – 2022

OVERVIEW

This work focused on reshaping a fragmented enterprise workflow used by intake analysts, brokers, and underwriters to create personalized benefit packages.

Disconnected tools, inconsistent data labeling, and limited workflow continuity were slowing decision-making, increasing cognitive load, and delaying delivery by up to two months. As Team Lead and Lead UX Designer, I shaped a more unified experience architecture that connected critical workflows, improved operational clarity, and supported more confident decision-making across the full proposal lifecycle.

The result was a 300% increase in task completion, along with stronger cross-functional alignment, improved usability, and a more scalable foundation for proposal and benefits operations.

Challenge

Intake analysts, brokers, and underwriters were operating across disconnected tools and fragmented workflows, creating delays of up to two months in delivering personalized benefit packages. The lack of workflow continuity, inconsistent data labeling, and limited visibility across roles increased cognitive load, slowed decision-making, and introduced avoidable errors.

This was not simply a usability issue. It was an enterprise workflow and information architecture problem affecting speed, accuracy, collaboration, and business performance.

My role

As Team Lead and Lead UX Designer, I led the design direction for a unified enterprise experience connecting the workflows, data sources, and decision points used by intake analysts, brokers, and underwriters.

My role centered on guiding the team through a systems-level redesign that reduced fragmentation, improved operational clarity, and created a scalable experience architecture for complex proposal workflows and multiple user roles.

By aligning cross-functional partners and focusing the team on the highest-value user needs, I shaped an integrated solution that unified information across providers, benefits, accounts, and related data sources, improving visibility, reducing duplication, and enabling more confident decision-making across the proposal lifecycle.

UX PROCESS

Discover

I partnered with product owners and managers to conduct research and testing with users across the workflow. This work uncovered several structural issues:

• experts were duplicating effort across siloed systems
• inconsistent labels and fragmented information slowed task completion
• role transitions introduced confusion and handoff friction
• adoption risk was tied not only to usability, but also to unfamiliarity and training concerns

These findings clarified that the core problem was not a single broken workflow, but a disconnected operating model that increased stress, reduced efficiency, and made the experience harder to trust.

 

 

UX strategy

Once the core pain points and opportunity areas were clear, I used the IBM Enterprise Garage framework to help shape a feasible, incremental strategy with product, business, and engineering.

This phase focused on aligning around:

• the highest-value workflows to address first
• the capabilities that needed to be unified
• how to sequence improvements in a way that balanced user value, feasibility, and business priority
• what the future-state experience architecture needed to support across roles and lifecycle stages

As a strong advocate for the customer experience, I contributed directly to planning and alignment conversations, helping ensure the proposed direction remained grounded in user needs while also being actionable for the organization.

UX structure

Once the core issues were clear, I focused on establishing the structural foundation the experience needed in order to scale.

This included defining:

• a clearer relationship between roles, tasks, and handoff points
• a more intuitive information hierarchy across key data sources
• a consistent model for how users would move through intake, proposal review, and underwriting decisions
• shared patterns and interaction logic that could reduce ambiguity across the system

This structure was essential because the experience had to support multiple user groups without becoming fragmented again. Rather than designing isolated screens, I worked to create a framework that brought coherence to the full lifecycle and made the product easier to understand, use, and extend over time.

IDeate

From there, I translated the strategy into role-based scenarios and end-to-end use cases centered on the most important product enablers.

The design work focused on:

• simplifying movement across complex workflows
• creating clearer information hierarchy and data relationships
• reducing cognitive load through more intuitive structure and labeling
• supporting role-specific needs without fragmenting the overall experience

I used rapid prototyping in Adobe XD and Figma to test concepts early, gather feedback quickly, and refine the experience based on actual user reactions. This helped de-risk assumptions, strengthen the architectural model, and improve confidence in the direction before implementation.

Build

In the final phase, I refined the visual system, documented process flows, and defined the UI components and interaction patterns needed to support consistent execution.

The resulting experience introduced a more modern, scalable, and intuitive framework for managing RFPs and benefit proposals. More importantly, it changed how experts engaged with the work by bringing clarity to fragmented tasks, making data easier to interpret, and helping teams move through complex processes with greater confidence and less friction.

The solution improved operational flow across intake analysts, brokers, and underwriters while creating a stronger enterprise foundation for future growth.

Intake analyst 

Underwriter 

Broker 

IMPACT

The work delivered a 300% increase in task completion and established a stronger operational model for proposal and benefits management.

By unifying workflows, improving clarity across roles, and reducing duplication, the experience strengthened collaboration, improved usability, and created a more scalable foundation for future enterprise growth.