MyHealth Online Interviews
Role: Lead UX Researcher
Tools: Miro, UserZoom, Microsoft Teams
Year: 2022
MyHealth Online (MHOL) is UPMC Health Plan’s member facing health insurance portal. Members can log in to access a variety of health insurance information, documents, and wellness resources. During this first phase of the redesign, I served as the sole researcher in charge of providing evidence that a redesign is needed in the first place.
The problem:
Evidence is needed in order to convince upper management and stakeholders that a redesign is necessary.
The solution:
Conduct user interviews to see if a redesign is necessary.
Deciding on a Battle Plan
How to test
When deciding how to approach this project, I settled on conducting user interviews with actual Health Plan members because I believed the data gathered would be the most convincing for stakeholders. In addition, user interviews can provide user clips and quotes that are memorable and have a higher impact than statistics alone.
Who to test
In terms of recruiting participants, I decided to recruit 6 commercial members who have used the MyUPMC app before. Since stakeholders were especially interested in the SSO experience from the MyUPMC app, participants need to be somewhat familiar with the app. I focused on Commercial members instead of other lines of business such as Medicare or Medicaid because of time restraints, and because Commercial members make up the majority of the Health Plan’s members.
What to test
In order to decide on the general tasks that I wanted to include in my testing, I first explored the MyUPMC app to see what the SSO experience is like. Based on this experience, I wrote down several items that I was curious about and wanted to include in the test. I also noticed that there are a few main MHOL pages that members are able to access, and decided to include one task involving each page. Ultimately, I decided to include tasks involving the SSO experience, Plans and Coverage, Claims and EOBs, Spending Summary, and Live Chat.
Scripting and Piloting
When writing interview scripts, I prefer to write down everything that I plan to say in order to make sure I don’t leave out any important information or disclosures, especially since I am working with PHI.
During this phase, I also created a note taking template and set up meetings with my notetakers to familiarize them with the template and the types of things I expected them to take notes on.
As part of my pilot test runs, I asked a research coworker to review my script. Unfortunately, none of my coworkers were available for a mock interview, so I had a friend pilot the interview. This actually turned out for the best, because my friend was able to provide more authentic feedback since they are not accustomed to the ins and outs of health insurance.
What did I Learn?
Below is a brief, high level view of what I discovered:
SSO Experience
Slow and steady does not win the race—Speed is an issue. The slow SSO loading screen caused confusion.
What’s MHOL?—Most participants did not realize they had been redirected, meaning any issues with MHOL will reflect on impressions of the MyUPMC app instead.
Android superiority—Some functionality is only available on Android phones.
Claims and EOBs
Filters and breadth of information are good—The Claims and EOBs page is comprehensive
Can’t view EOBS on iphone—A recurring issue, participants with iphones were unable to access all functions
Live Chat
It’s all about location—The location of the live chat was not what people expected (participants expected it to be at the bottom of pages)
Plans and Coverage
Not what was expected—The landing page for plans and coverage was uninformative and not what people expected to see.
People just want to search—Participants repeatedly looked for and voiced desire for a search bar to easily find what they wanted.
PDFs and phones don’t mix—Participants disliked having to look through PDFs on their phones.
Spending Summary
Simplicity works—Spending summary had a lot of positive feedback!
Participants want enhanced filters—The current filters and good, but could be improved to include more customizable options.
Overall
The issues that stood out the most to participants was overall navigation and findability of information
Half of the participants described the experience as “maze-like” or a “puzzle” to find information
Constant redirects to different places leave users confused
From these interviews, I was able to identify several pressing issues and areas of improvement that greatly affect both functional usage of MHOL on mobile devices and perceptions of the MHOL site as a whole. These insights will also serve as jumping off points into deeper research into some problem areas as redesign efforts continue.
Future Directions
These findings were incorporated into a pitch deck to support the need to redesign MHOL. This effort has since been approved and I am currently working on conducting supporting research.