Medicare Advantage

Issue

While looking at our retirement flow, the design team realized they needed an additional page to ask people their Medicare information for Medicare Advantage. Medicare Advantage allows people to combine their Medicare parts A, B, and (sometimes) D into one plan. Medicare Advantage may also include insurance like vision, hearing, and dental as well as a predetermined network of doctors. Retirees have to fill this out every year for themselves and their spouse (if applicable). The design team wanted to ensure that this page made sense to retirees, they could successfully fill out the form and notice when items were missing (like a physical address).

Process

For this study, I decided that it would be best to conduct this study with retirees who are on Medicare. At first, I used one of our usability tools but had trouble with recruiting. I was able to talk with retirees but no one that was on Medicare or at least Medicare eligible. Therefore, they did not understand why this form was shown, why it needed to be filled out, and what some of the questions meant.

From here, I decided to switch gears and use our internal pool of participants. While our participant pool did not have many people in this group, I was more successful at getting scheduled participants but in the end I was only able to speak with 3 users. I originally had 6 participants scheduled but two were no-shows and one had to cancel due to a family emergency. While talking with the participants, two could not figure out how to screen-share; so instead of doing a traditional usability test, I decided to change my tactic and conduct contextual interview. I shared my screen and was able to hear their thoughts about the page and understand what confuses them. Even though I had fewer users than expected, I was able to get good insights and thorough feedback. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I was unable to schedule more participants for this study.

Outcome

Even though I was only able to speak with three people, they provided me with great insights on ways the form could be improved. One issue all three people noticed was that when form asks for their “Medicare Beneficiary Identifier”, the number this is referring to is called “Medicare Number” on their Medicare card. Even though users can click on the question mark to see where to find this number, it would be much less confusing and would save time if the question used the same language that is found on Medicare cards. Another issue was people wanted to know why they had to fill out information on start dates twice - these users did not realize that one question was for them and the other was for their spouse. Therefore, having some separation on this question would be helpful, alleviate frustration about entering information in “twice”, and avoid users from accidentally entering in the wrong information. After going through this and other issues found, the design team came up with the redesigned form. As you can see, this form clearly highlights who you’re filling in information for. Also, the design team checked with sponsors and said that new medicare cards are going to say “Medicare Beneficiary Identifier”; however, some people will still have the old card. I advised that they have both terms visible to avoid confusion and keep the illustrated example of how to find this information. This new design will soon be tested.

If I could do this study again:

If I could do this study again, there would be many things I would do differently. Here are some of the changesI would make:

• Finding people on Medicare was very difficult.

  • With this study, I would supplement my users who aren’t on Medicare with Retirees (since people part of this population was much easier than finding Medicare people). However, I would provide them with an in-depth scenario about them being on Medicare.

  • I would explain what Medicare is and would also provide them with a fake Medicare card so they could go through the experience on their own.

• Allow more time to recruit for medicare individuals from our internal pool.

• Check with our tool provider (prior to launching the test) to determine if they have an adequate amount of people from this population.

*Note: After this study, I met with my manager and discussed ways we could build up our Medicare population since more Medicare projects were coming up. Some of my ideas were:

• Site Intercept: For people who are coming to our site to learn more about Medicare, signing up for Medicare, or doing their annual enrollment for Medicare, we could do a pop up or some kind of dialogue box asking if they would like to be a part of internal panel.

• Google Analytics: Through Google Analytics we have a list of people who have visited the site and left feedback of some kind. Filtering through the comments we could find people who have had issues with Medicare and (if it does not violate HIPAA) contact them to learn more about what occurred and ask if they would like to be a member of internal panel.