| Client | Skills | Project Dates | What is | URL |
|---|---|---|---|---|
CMS.gov/Healthcare.gov | UX StrategyUX Research - Discovery WorkUX/UI Design | January 1, 2024 → March 8, 2024 | What is the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)? CMS is the federal agency that provides health coverage to more than 160 million through Medicare, Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, and the Health Insurance Marketplace. CMS works in partnership with the entire health care community to improve quality, equity and outcomes in the health care system. |
CMS.gov Agent and Broker Support Portal
While at Sky Solutions, I was brought onto a project to help CMS.gov refine and streamline the knowledge portal for Agents and Brokers and to provide them with a ChatGPT AI tool to provide them assistance and tracking support tickets.
During the three months I was on the project, I gathered insights from stakeholders (Nelly Connolly), distilled those insights into a project plan with applicable KPIs, collaborated with colleagues on design and development, and designed prototypes to be built using ServiceNow.
I was the only UX Strategist and Designer on the project and the team I collaborated with included a Product Manager, another Business Analyst, and two to five ServiceNow developers.
Challenges
To design a custom prototype for a ServiceNow Portal and ChatGPT AI Chatbot for CMS.gov.
Design Process
Since the team was creating a product built using ServiceNow tools, I based my process on the Design Thinking approach and followed the below process:
- Discovery
- Ideation
- Solution
Conducting Stakeholder Interviews (Discovery)
I started off my work on the project by conducting stakeholder interviews with Nelly Connolly, the Account Manager of HHS contracts and Product Owner for this design solution. I discussed the problem with Nelly since my meetings with her team had members misunderstand her ideas and goals for the solution, leading to a lot of confusing and conflicting ideas (clarifying and repeated talking points) as to what solution we needed to design and build, contradictory outcomes being thrown around, resulting in delaying the project timeline.
By interviewing Nelly, I was able to gain clarity on what the experience, informational, and technical problems and what the desired outcomes should be, with the main focus on first condensing and streamlining the support and informational experience for CMS.gov Agents and Brokers, and branching out to other government healthcare sites (and a broader user base) in 2024.
Above is a screenshot of the current submenu for CMS Agents and Brokers, which scatter links and resources across CMS.gov, Healthcare.gov, or other sites, which forces Agents and Brokers to go hunting for the information and resources they need.
Understanding the Problem (Discovery)
CMS.gov has scattered support offerings and relevant information for CMS Agents and Brokers and they also do not have an efficient method to track and resolve submitted support requests.
Our solution seeks to help CMS.gov Agents and Brokers better find the information and assistance they need to improve their jobs (getting people insurance coverage they need), update insurance and policy knowledge, and receive the latest training as well as anyone visiting Healthcare.gov, Medicare.gov (and other government program websites) to get information they need and provide custom support for questions or concerns.
In conducting stakeholder interviews with Nelly Connelly, the problems with CMS.gov’s Agent and Broker support offerings are twofold:
- The offerings for Agents and Brokers are scattered between numerous phone numbers and emails to contact CMS.gov. This can lead to
- Calling the CMS.gov Help Desk phone numbers or emailing the team resulting in:
- Sending important questions or concerns into a support “black hole” and
- Frequent calls and long wait times
- There’s no efficient way to track issues being brought up by Agents and Brokers nor any support or ticketing system on the current FAQs for Agents & Brokers site as a tool to help. This can lead to
- Agents and Brokers reaching out to the same CMS Help Desks through various social media channels, with mixed results on getting needed assistance.
- CMS potentially falling behind on helping Agents and Brokers in getting the help they need, increasing frustration for the Agency and the Agents and Brokers offering government health coverage to people who need it.
Our Challenges and Solution Goals (Discovery)
Our goal for the project was to provide an improved design for CMS’s FAQ portal page that consolidates information and resources and will save time in having Agents and Brokers find the information they need and reduce the time in calling or emailing CMS.gov for support. A new ChatGPT AI solution incorporated in the ServiceNow knowledge portal aims to answer specific questions and help fill in, track, and resolve submitted support tickets (increasing work efficiency for CMS.gov customer service agents).
- Our Solution: Build a ServiceNow Knowledge Portal
- Our Goal: Consolidate information and resources and save time in having Agents and Brokers find the information they need and reduce the time in calling or emailing CMS.gov for support
- Our Solution: Engineer an AI tool that will comb through support topics and information and assist in filling in support tickets for people using the support portal.
- Our Goal: Cutting down on the number of support tickets being submitted and reducing the time needed to fill in support tickets
- Our Solution: Provide back end support to help people track the tickets they submitted through the portal, informing them on current and potential next steps in the support process
- Our Goal: Giving people transparency and peace of mind in communicating with CMS
“Cleaning Up” CMS.gov’s Agent and Broker Experience (Ideation)
After conducting stakeholder interviews with Nelly, I mapped out problems, ideas, ServiceNow solutions she brought up and conducted a UX Heuristics and IA Audit of CMS.gov navigation and resources for Agents and Brokers using Figjam.
This problem solving and auditing helped in visualizing and connecting ideas and identify experience and design solutions build and maintain for CMS.gov and CMS Agents and Brokers.
Who We’re Helping with This Project (Ideation)
I created personas based on my research done with Nelly and conducting heuristics on CMS.gov. From the research, I chose to focus primarily on the Agent and Broker persona to start in building out design solutions (with other personas and designs following for others people later on).
We want to help Agents and Brokers more efficiently receive information, training, and support to help them better connect with people to get the health coverage they need, stay on top of updates, building connections with people, answering their questions, and supporting the changes in coverage with ease
The same issues arise for visitors of Healthcare.gov, Medicare.gov, and other government healthcare websites and we planned to design a similar experience and AI solution for people visiting those sites in 2024.
Low and Medium Wireframing (Solution)
While mapping out ideas, I created low and medium fidelity prototypes and wireframes in Figma, which visualized the improved experience design and ChatGPT AI solution for the development team, so they could build a custom portal for CMS.gov using ServiceNow.
The prototype for the CMS Agent and Broker Support Page is better laid out to disentangle the amount Agent and Broker resources and information, reducing the confusion and time it takes to find information that Agents and Brokers need, making the process of finding information or getting help more straightforward. The design idea also gives the ChatGPT AI solution a modern, easily-updated support portal in which to further assist Agents and Brokers, answer their questions with the most up-to-date knowledge, and proactively fill out any submission tickets being submitted based on conversational data shared in the conversation, reducing the time needed to fill out a more detailed or urgent email or submission ticket to send to CMS.gov personnel.
In addition to creating site wireframes, I “cleaned up” the CMS.gov navigation for the Agent and Broker submenu.
Above is a screenshot of the current submenu for CMS Agents and Brokers, which scatter links and resources across CMS.gov, Healthcare.gov, or other sites, which forces Agents and Brokers to go hunting for the information and resources they need.
The screenshot above is one I designed that condenses the links, resources, and directories & lists (which features applicable links in the larger, older version of the submenu). This design also includes the redesigned Support Portal page for CMS Agents and Brokers (as the last two links: Directories & Lists and Support Topics & FAQs).
Using the CMS Agent and Broker Resource PDFs and the Figjam mapping featured in the Discovery phase, the Agent and Broker phone numbers and emails are placed in their own tabs in the Support Portal page, so further support methods can be more easily accessed with less clicking around CMS.gov, saving time and streamlining the process to find needed info.
Takeaways
I handed off my insights and designs to the team, who continued to work to create a custom ServiceNow knowledge base portal along with a ChatGPT AI solution to help in assisting users. The team’s goal was to create an MVP of the solution in Mid-April 2024.
Given more time, I would create more high fidelity prototypes for the team, conduct user testing (surveys, user interviews, among other methods) to ensure that we’re designing and engineering the best solution for CMS.gov users, and refine key metrics and project goals so that my design solutions would more effectively solve user experience issues.
I would also want to conduct broader user research and design custom solutions for Healthcare.gov, Medicare.gov, and other government health program sites so that design and support solutions can be made available to a wider range of the public seeking information and support for their government health coverage.
In being part of this project, I gained valuable experience in clarifying ideas from the Product Owner, trying to navigate conflicting ideas from other team members. and providing a North Star/clearer guidance on what was asked of the team.
