Health Insurance App for Medicaid Recipients

Our team built and launched a mobile app to provide low-income residents of a large US city with easy access to their healthcare. We pivoted in early 2020 to launch a “lean” MVP in April 2020 to respond to the global pandemic.

Team: As a researcher, I was embedded in a client product group with designers and another researcher.

Challenges: Providing access to an under-resourced group in a highly regulated environment. Managing sensitive PHI data. Delivering complex services to users in a siloed client environment. 

Photo of hands with silver rings and nail polish holding smartphone by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

Approach: I joined this engagement as an individual contributor, but grew into a strategic program leader and research manager. Beyond the research learnings, I focused on chipping away at organizational silos. I approached this by identifying internal allies to help shape research questions and share insights. Over the course of over two years on the project, research methods and tasks included:

  • Multiple rounds of in-depth interviews, with ten to thirteen participants per user segment
  • Dozens of rounds of usability testing, including qualitative and quantitative reporting, with five to eight participants per user segment
  • Design and implementation of three surveys
  • One round of card sorting
  • Analysis via affinity diagraming, thematic coding, and the rainbow spreadsheet as appropriate
  • Participant management, including an emphasis on data privacy

Impact: The user-friendly app consistently receives the highest NPS of all service touch-points within the organization. The backlog continues to be driven by user needs.

To respect client privacy, these case studies have been anonymized.