| Experience design – Cigna & Evernorth, 2021 – 2022

OVERVIEW

This portfolio project focused on modernizing pharmacy network modeling for enterprise sales teams by replacing spreadsheet-driven analysis and manual coordination with a more structured digital experience.

At the time, teams were assembling network proposals through disconnected tools and ad hoc workflows, which slowed turnaround, increased operational strain, and limited the organization’s ability to respond to client opportunities with speed and precision. I led the experience strategy for a new enterprise solution designed to support scenario modeling, tradeoff analysis, and recommendation development within a more intelligent and scalable environment.

The resulting direction improved efficiency by 95% and established a stronger foundation for future product expansion and market responsiveness.

Challenge

Sales professionals relied on spreadsheets and manual communication to gather pharmacy information, assess market trends, evaluate risk, and respond to client requests for network models. This fragmented process slowed decision-making, increased operational strain, and created missed business opportunities.

The underlying problem was larger than efficiency alone. The organization lacked a more intelligent and structured way to model pharmacy networks, compare tradeoffs, and support client decisions at scale.

My Role

As the Lead UX/UI Designer for Cigna partnered with Evernorth, I was responsible for leading the experience strategy for a new enterprise solution developed through Cigna’s partnership with Evernorth. While I had a team supporting the work, my hands-on focus was in UX strategy, product structure, and shaping the overall experience direction.

I approached the challenge as both a product and decision-support systems problem. The goal was to move users from fragmented manual processes into a more intelligent environment where they could model pharmacy networks, evaluate scenarios, and make more confident recommendations with less friction and less risk.

I led the strategic direction for the experience, helping define the role-based model, information structure, simulation framework, and dashboard concepts that would support faster and more informed decisions. The resulting solution improved efficiency by 95% and created a stronger foundation for future enhancements and market growth.

UX PROCESS

Exploration

I began by immersing myself in the existing operating environment through interviews with subject matter experts and users, with close attention to how modeling requests were initiated, validated, and translated into client-ready recommendations.

This work surfaced a set of unmet needs that pointed to a broader structural gap in the experience. Users needed a more seamless way to adopt new network offerings, reduce manual setup across applications, customize pharmacy segments with greater clarity, and evaluate options through a framework that felt more intelligent and responsive to business conditions.

Key findings:

• Users need a seamless network modeling: Craft user-centric designs that facilitate the effortless adoption of new network offerings from ESI, reducing the implementation timeline by 3 months, ensuring users experience a smooth and timely transition to enhanced services.
• Users need an effortless automation: Design automated processes that introduce new networks across Cigna applications with minimal user input.
• Users need to customize pharmacy segments: Craft an intuitive interface that empowers users to easily navigate and select from tiered pharmacy networks, offering personalized options between preferred and non-preferred pharmacies with clear cost differences, enhancing their decision-making experience.
• Users need an intelligent and personalized experience: Design an intelligent framework that recommends up to three optimized pharmacy network options for clients based on specific business rules. This ensures a personalized experience that aligns with each client’s unique needs and preferences.

 

UX strategy

The strategic direction centered on moving away from fragmented task completion and toward a more deliberate decision-support model.

Rather than digitizing the existing spreadsheet process, I defined an experience that could structure how users compared scenarios, interpreted tradeoffs, and arrived at recommendations. The aim was to create a system in which the relationship between business rules, network variables, and client needs became more visible and actionable.

This shift positioned the product as more than an internal tool. It became a framework for supporting faster, more informed, and more consistent network decisions across the organization.

SYSTEMIZATION

A major part of the work involved defining the structural model that would allow the product to handle complexity without losing clarity.

I focused on how the experience should organize key inputs, how simulation and recommendation patterns should work together, and how dashboards could support comparison without overwhelming the user. This required establishing a stronger relationship between role-based responsibilities, modeling workflows, and the outputs users needed to justify recommendations.

That systemization work created the backbone of the experience and ensured the product could support analytical depth while remaining understandable and scalable.

Ideation

After setting the strategic direction, I guided the work through multiple rounds of iteration and validation.

This phase focused on refining both the interface and the flow logic to ensure the experience could support sophisticated decision-making without becoming overwhelming. Internal testing and feedback loops helped strengthen:

• the balance between simplicity and complexity
• clarity of scenario modeling flows
• usability of the dashboard and recommendation patterns
• confidence in how users navigated tradeoffs and outputs

This iterative process helped de-risk the solution and sharpen the product direction before implementation.

 

 

Iteration and Validation

As the work moved toward delivery, I ensured the strategy translated into implementation-ready outputs.

I supported the team through polished prototypes, documented flows, UI specifications, and annotated components that gave engineering the clarity needed to build with confidence and consistency. I also ensured the solution aligned with accessibility expectations and reflected a high standard of interaction quality across the experience.

The final result was a more intelligent enterprise platform that helped experts move from manual coordination to faster, more confident, and more scalable network modeling.

 

hand-offs

As the solution matured, I translated the strategy into implementation-ready outputs that could support a high-quality build.

This included polished prototypes, documented flows, UI specifications, and annotated components that gave engineering a clear path forward. I also ensured the experience aligned with accessibility expectations and maintained a high standard of interaction quality throughout the system.

The final direction introduced a more intelligent platform for pharmacy network modeling, allowing experts to move from manual assembly toward a more disciplined, scalable, and confidence-building way of working.

IMPACT

The solution improved efficiency by 95% and created a stronger operational foundation for network modeling across the business.

By introducing a more structured approach to scenario evaluation and recommendation development, the platform reduced manual coordination, increased consistency, and strengthened the organization’s ability to respond to client needs with greater speed and precision.