A complete redesign of the BCBSTN mobile app experience. Launched in August of 2021, offering members a new way to engage with BlueCross. Features created that includes Digital ID Card, Plan Coverage, Claims, Spending Accounts, Finding Care, Estimate Costs, Appointment Scheduling and Live Chat.
Conversion Rate
Total Downloads
Member Usage
Information
Architecture
Interaction
Design
Userflows
Wireframing
Lo-fi to Hi-fi
Prototypes
Design
Documentation
The current mobile application is significantly under-utilized by members, largely due to its outdated platform and limited functionality. This legacy environment presents ongoing issues with performance, security, and compatibility, while also restricting the implementation of modern features and integrations.
The primary goal is to transition the mobile app to a modern, cross-platform framework in order to address critical performance, usability, and compatibility issues. This shift is essential not only to resolve existing technical debt but also to lay the foundation to redefining user experience, we aim to align the product with evolving member expectations and significantly increase adoption and engagement.
Gather research and analyze problems
Assess pain points, evaluate constraints
Design, userflows and test solutions
System design, documentation and handoff
We've looked at the previous app and gathered research from usability moderated and unmoderated studies, alpha testing, qualtrics survey and moderated UX studies to dive deeper into user behaviors and motivations.
Part of this phase is examining both direct competitors and best-in-class platforms across various industries. I've also analyzed data call reports to identify trends in how the app was being used and where the pain points of users are coming from.
A design thinking workshops was held that includes different divisions from internal teams to define the problems and understand members usage on the app's shortcomings.
Ideas were generated from the workshop and narrowed down based on most useful functions for the members and I worked with development team to evaluate and determine the feasibility within the given constraints.
The team conducted open card sort exercise to learn how the users understands insurance terms and labels and how would they renamed and grouped them into categories.
We've then gathered these insights and used to generate multiple versions of the sitemap, exploring different structural approaches to organizing content.
Building on this. We've create user personas using user data and developed user storymaps to visualize key user flows, mapping each interaction step from entry to task completion. This approach helped align team understanding and highlight critical touchpoints.
Leveraging these insights, I began and start creating a series of low-fidelity wireframes and interaction flows to explore potential solutions for each core functionality. These early design concepts were focused on addressing usability challenges and aligning with user expectations.
I then developed an initial interactive prototype, which was tested with target users to gather qualitative feedback. The usability testing sessions focused on evaluating the intuitiveness, functionality, and overall user experience of the proposed features. The insights gained informed the next iteration of the design.
Following the initial round of usability testing, I synthesized user feedback and developed two prototype variations to A/B test key areas of the experience: Navigation, visual design and overall app architecture. Working closely with UX research team, we analyzed user interactions and behavioral patterns across both versions.
The results from the AB test helped identify which elements performed more effectively in terms of usability, clarity, and success rate of interaction. I started to refine the components and create into a single prototype.
The team conducted moderated usability sessions to evaluate how easily members can use the redesigned mobile app to accomplish the following key tasks:
Overall, clarity and delight have improved since early testing.
Once the final designs were approved, I focused on building out the design system defining and documenting foundational elements and reusable components. This include detailed annotations and guidelines for core UI elements such as headers, navigation, buttons, and shell templates to ensure consistency across screens and future scalability.
I then consolidated all high-fidelity screens and created a comprehensive prototype that mapped out all major user flows. Since our team used Sketch for native design and InVision for publishing prototype, I leveraged InVision’s built-in interactive tools to demonstrate complex transitions and key microinteractions within the app experience.
Both the design documentation and interactive prototypes were shared with the engineering team via shared links and centralized handoff assets folder. To maintain alignment during implementation, we had a weekly meeting with stakeholders and engineers answering questions, clarifying design decisions, and making necessary adjustments to accommodate technical constraints without compromising the overall user experience.
It took 7 years to reach 300k users with the previous app. With the relaunch, it doubled the numbers in less than 4 years. Currently it has +88% in weekly average conversion rate since the release.