How I led design updates and a navigation redesign that helped improve task success rate by 20%.
Blue Cross Blue Shield is one of the biggest health insurance companies in the U.S. Their Federal Employee Program, or FEP, covers over 50% of the 8.3 million American federal workers and retirees around the world.
When they asked us to improve discoverability and get more USPS workers to sign up, we came up with bold solutions.
Client
Blue Cross Blue Shield Federal Employee Program
Duration
January 2024 - April 2025
Services
Wireframes, Prototypes, Journey Maps, Design Systems
My Role
Lead UX Designer
Website
My first objective
We had tons of ideas to visualize and pain points to solve, but our team was stuck with decision paralysis.
I knew I could use design to cut through the noise and create a journey map that we could align on before redesigning anything.
FEP had a couple of very old journey maps that aligned to personas they made. The problem was that the personas weren't based on real people or interviews – they were a mix of stereotypes rolled into what FEP wanted their customers to be like.
After we conducted 20 interviews, we started mapping the different phases of choosing health insurance and when they (most likely) happen during the year. Together in Miro we filled in the relevant Targets (AKA people) and Touchpoints.
All 6 iterations of our journey map.
This exercise answered a tough question for us: which parts of the user journey should the navigation focus on the most? We chose the middle 3 phases, since they contain the most user frustration, digital touchpoints and opportunities.
The final journey map.
My second objective
Once we were aligned on the journey, we were ready to create a bespoke hub of health insurance resources for USPS members.
At the time we were the only ones bold enough to tailor several pages to the needs of USPS members.
You may be wondering: why the emphasis on USPS members? What about other federal agencies…?
All of them are important but 2024 was the year that OPM directed USPS members to reconsider their health insurance. We knew there would be a much higher than average influx of workers and retirees looking at FEP.
USPS members have their own dedicated landing pages, as well as plan and prescription pages.
My third objective
Now I felt more confident in redesigning the navigation.
I had everything I needed: user insights, journey map, design system, and the direction.
The main dropdowns would act as a sequence that goes through plan information, coverage details, and helpful resources.
I proposed three directions that go from incremental changes to substantial progress.
It was very common for our agency, MERGE, to show designs as 3 options per presentation. This format helped us see what clients respond to the most – and they won't feel like they're stuck with just 1 or 2 options to pick from.
Main nav Option #2 is notable because it had more sensible grouping and got rid of the featured articles.
Over 50% of our respondents preferred Main nav Option #3: the mega menu approach.
Fin
The client loved our designs, our developers pushed the updates to the live site, and we all lived happily ever after.
A brief aside: I was new to this client in early 2024. I had inherited a Figma file that only had desktop designs. Yikes!
Thankfully I was able to use Variables to quickly make nearly 100 comps into mobile designs, so I could stay focused on the navigation redesign.