Design

Research

A Chat Widget that Accelerates Health Service Delivery

The BCBSA team gave us an ambitious but vague goal—to transform their classic internal email system to a real-time chat. But why？

During the project kickoff meeting and initial stakeholder interviews, team members showed fluency on challenges they previously encountered on internal communication and expressed genuine hopes for the new communication methods, yet went blurred on how the new form, the real-time chat, would bring about the impact.

With first-hand responses and reactions, I listed the following questions we need to answer:

Why the legacy system falls short—and how live chat fills the gap?


Product Value

What UX features should we prioritize in our first release?

Work Scope

How can we ensure users succeed in a workflow none of them has tried yet?

User Experience


Learn how communication weaves through day-to-day work operations

To understand what motivates the team to set up this urgent change, my first move is to map out overall picture of employee day-to-day and how messaging fits into it:

Strategy 01: Discover product value -> Identify context, value, and success

I designed and introduced a “Job to Be Done” (JTBD) exercise to managers and leaders at BCBSA, in which we reflected how work wins of each employee role at BCBSA contributes to the ultimate business success.

Inspired by the dependencies between employees, I visualized the micro- and macro-systems that internal communication sits in. The map explores direct communicators and indirect participants, collaboration models, and reporting lines, and further explains how BCBSA’s internal workflows impact its services that targets to millions of Americans.

Wins:

These efforts led BCBSA leadership to realize, to their surprise, that this communication tool could deliver massive value to the success of their core business. It helped the entire team secure additional resources — since the project kickoff, the team has added 5+ engineers and one designer to support the development.


The connections between workflows and staffs in the ecosystem diagram above helped product managers develop the product features and roadmap for the coming year. Over 12+ features were detailed upon the diagram and relevant user journeys.


Strategy 02: Define project scope -> Facilitate team decision making

Although the insights were inspiring, they only had an influence when we brought them back to the team. Therefore, I hosted a product alignment workshop with the product managers (PMs) and technical leads to understand the business and development priorities and trade-offs, and to influence the scope with user-centered findings.

  • Aligned research insights and user journeys via framing as Job-to-be-done(JTBD)s, highlighting their business value.

  • Sorted JTBDs by 'Must-have/Will-have/Wish-to-have/Never-have', facilitating decisions on product roadmap.

  • Understood development priorities and trade-offs.


Strategy 03: Shape seamless UX -> Seeing the problem from the routines

Given the target user group has been clearly defined, we recruited 5 current employees to participate in job shadowing and ethnographic painting—focus on user behaviors and pain points.

I also created persona libraries to present user data at an individual level, including tool preferences, learning confidence, work habits, and expectations, to serve as a reference for future design work.

When finalizing the design, I took multiple factors into account that contribute to an efficient, novel-friendly experience with guaranteed accuracy.

The split layout enables quick lookups from multiple sources. The copy-paste shortcut ensures data transfer. UX writing guides users through the new feature and system state. Every detail was designed upon user behavioral patterns and to help users and BCBSA achieve their goals.

Wins:

Our first release of 2022 received tremendous positive feedback from twelve pilot teams within the company:

We reduced chat handle time by 67%, down to 2.3 min—far below the 5-min benchmark.

We drove BCBS NPS to +38 in just three months.

And we accelerated claims cycle: 95% of claims processed within 14 days, 99 % of claims processed within 30 days


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