Building with purpose & precision

| UX Lead @ Cigna, 2020 – 2021

As a Lead UX designer, I led the redesign, seamlessly blending the organization’s branding with usability. My priority was to rebrand the solution and create an experience that exceeded user expectations, making it easy to manage client benefits and stay competitive. I aimed to ensure users felt supported and empowered by the tools they used daily.

 

Challenge

Due to unclear flows, cumbersome UI components, and hard-to-find features, experts often felt lost in their journeys with us. They needed an intelligent way to manage benefit plans, clinical coverage elections, and account-to-client associations, ensuring flexible and sensible solutions for our clients and customers.

With this in mind, we redesigned the product, rebranding it and simplifying visuals to make features and coverage elections easier to find. This redesign boosted user satisfaction, reduced the time spent discovering features, and increased task completion by 50%, creating new opportunities for role advancement and training.

 

Let’sdig in! 

 

Discovering..

I began by prioritizing user and design goals, but soon noticed that cross-functional teams were unfamiliar with design thinking. I needed their support for achieving our experience objectives and wanted to involve them as early as possible. To address this, I identified allies and advocated for the process, gradually recruiting team members for co-designing by promoting design thinking and an integrated framework to enhance our collaboration. This approach led to the formation of small advocate groups that engaged users for research, testing, and documenting insights to share with the broader team.

 

 

 

Empathizing…

Then, I interviewed primary users and SMEs to identify key pain points. Using these insights, we developed a detailed customer journey map to outline the desired experience, highlighting user personas, pain points, and touchpoints. This map aligned all teams on the same mission, ensuring a cohesive, user-centered design approach that enhanced usability, user engagement, and satisfaction.

 

 

 

 

Defining…

I also had the privilege of teaming up with internal experts who eagerly recruited users for research and testing as much as possible, fueling the work and elevating the quality of the designs. Alongside conducting interviews, I spent a significant amount of time analyzing the current state of the product, challenging the status quo, and identifying opportunities for improvement. This deep dive provided invaluable insights into user experiences, shaping the design process from the ground up

 

 

Designing…

After identifying and prioritizing user needs, I began with wireframing, iterating quickly to ensure the designs truly reflected what users needed. Drawing from my IBM training, I kept the early designs simple and rough, refining them continuously while checking against the 10 Nielsen Norman heuristics. As the wireframes evolved into visual designs, I shared them with participants, using A/B testing and feedback sessions to ensure the visuals resonated with them and met their expectations.

 

 

 

 

Polishing…

With the look and feel established, I honed in on usability and design choices, ensuring every component worked seamlessly. I took extra care to clearly communicate the design to the engineering team by creating comprehensive Style and Interaction Guides, which accompanied the high-fidelity prototype. Last but not least, I carefully documented user flows for each sprint and championed design thinking to strengthen cross-functional collaboration, paving the way for delivering high-quality solutions that truly resonate with users.