LIFELAB’s ADVANTAGE
This is school-based Service design project that aims to improve the service touchpoints of LifeLab’s employee benefits and employee assistance plans. LifeLab is a healthcare service provider in Canada that provides client’s end users the necessary healthcare coverage and assistance. Our team of 5 conducted an end-to-end design process to deliver a new service vision in the form of LifeLab’s Advantage.
Collaborator
University of Toronto students for user interviews.
Timeline
Jan 2023 – Apr 2023
Role
This is a team effort that covers the entire design process: user research, ideating, prototyping, and testing. I focused heavily in areas of user research, workshop facilitation and testing. I also came up with some preliminary drafts on Figma.
Tools
Clipchamp video-maker, Figma, Miro, Whiteboarding tools
Overview
Our team was assigned to work on LifeLabs’ healthcare service redesign with the following goals, target audience and business requirements:
THE PROBLEM
Our team conducted jurisdictional reviews and user interviews with 5 student participants to map out their current-state journey to receive their healthcare benefits from their service providers. We found that the root causes of several issues tend to stem from the first 3 stages of the current journey:
- Poor onboarding;
- Limited access to information and education quality during research; and
- Inefficiency of service engagement.
We dived deeper into the touchpoints of each of these stages and uncovered the specified issues contributing to these general pains:
ONBOARDING – Not knowing the exact steps and procedures at the beginning or what to expect are causing issues and negative feelings later in the journey once end users need to use their coverage. We learned that the unsatisfactory 2nd stage of research is also the result of poor onboarding. We will thus address these 2 stages in the future-state Onboarding process in the Solutioning section.
SERVICE ENGAGEMENT – Users are negatively affected by the need to visit multiple healthcare facilities and the absence of digital/virtual assistance when obtaining referrals and seeking urgent care. There is thus a need to streamline the service procurement process from bookings to consultation follow ups.
the solutioning
FUTURE STATE MAPPING (JOURNEY MAPS AND SERVICE BLUEPRINTS)
Our team proceeded with consolidating and defining the needs of our users through a series of affinity diagraming, ideation and storyboarding session. An internal whiteboarding session was conducted to brainstorm options that could help address the identified problems.
After much discussion, we map our idealized future-state touchpoint journeys for each of our focused stages as follow:
Onboarding – Ease of coverage plan customization through easy screeners and questionnaires; more accessible and succinct coverage summaries and additional channels to contact help support.
Service Engagement – Instant matching to appropriate advisors for immediate assistance and advise on referral system; online bookings; omni-channel correspondence to follow up on test results and prescriptions.
This culminates to an idealised Service Blueprint to factor in key stakeholders from our front stage and back stage users (i.e. client’s end users, healthcare service providers, consultants and clinical practitioners).
CO-DESIGNING WORKSHOPS
It was important to also validate our envisioned journeys through a series of co-design workshops with our student users. Our team conducted a Miro workshop, as well as a physical workshop, where we asked users to select their top solution choices for each of our 3 pivotal touchpoints. We then asked them to comment or sketch what those ideas mean to them when translated into a mobile application. The discovered needs and wants of our users are then further incorporated into our next prototype iteration (next section)
In order to help with their visual brainstorming, I individually came up with several starter wireframes for several solution choices that allow participants to work on without needing to design something from scratch on the spot.
MID-FI WIREFRAMES
Some mid-fidelity wireframes that we have produced from our co-design workshops are such as interfaces for coverage plan selection and customization, as well as learning about their plans in a less steep learning curve via and search-and-watch vide demo tool and a short summary coverage page.
It was also important to have a clear dashboard that makes eligible healthcare providers easy to lookup based on varying criteria, as well as information priority on a view of the summary coverage balance the users are endowed with.
FINAL PROTOTYPE
Our validated med-fi prototypes are then translated into a hi-fidelity prototype where we incorporated colour and font themes based on LifeLab’s corporate branding.
Onboarding Redesign
Service Engagement Redesign
key takeaways
Hardest things about the process:
- Staying focused on specific touch and pivot points
- Providing just enough information in co-design without steering users too much
- Getting users to draw actively and meaningfully in co-design workshops!
- Mapping our service blueprint (there was a lot to consider!)
- Challenging ourselves to move beyond the low-hanging fruit (we designed some flows that we are not sure we could do as service designers, but we enjoyed the creative freedom!
Easiest things about the process:
- Having fun as a team (it sounds lame, but we had a good time!)
- Storyboarding and sketching out how we thought the experience should look like
- Filming once we had strong storyboards/script
EXTRAS
Promotional Video
I individually edited the final promotional video of LifeLab’s Advantage with Clipchamp and Wondershare Filmora.
Sequential Storyboard
Check out our full sequential storyboard of the LifeLab’s Advantage app too!
Final Interactive Prototype (LifeLab’s Advantage Mobile App)