Mitchell Claims Examiner Portal (CEP) Redesign

Summary

The Claims Examiner Portal (CEP) legacy product was built in early 2000’s to serve Claims Adjusters in approving and denying bills. In February 2018, it was decided to not only give it a facelift, but also an overhaul! With this directive, I was tasked, as the sole UX designer, to lead the CEP Redesign project. I was paired with one other Product Manager, and together we set out to make history. In April 2021, we released CEP Redesign to multiple elated customers as the new standard for product design at Mitchell.

Product: Mitchell Claims Examiner Portal (CEP)

Project: Product Redesign

Years: February 2018 - April 2021

Duration: 3 years

Role: Senior Experience Designer - Principal Product Designer

Problem Space

The two main problems leading the business to approve the case to redesign CEP were efficiency and sellability.

CEP was over 15 years old, and the slow and clumsy interface proved a great pain for customers and internal product support, alike.

Together with the outdated and dreary look of Windows95, it was hard for the Sales team to compete in a market where customers and were looking at more modern competitive options.

The Challenge

The idea was simple in theory. Modernize the UI and use the latest technology to make CEP a more desirable product to its customers, and for the Mitchell brand.

My Role

When this project began in early 2018, I was leading the project as a solo Senior Experience Designer along with one Product Manager. As the scope of the project increased, so did my responsibilities. Not only did I continue to work on the features, but I also managed offshore remote designers and onshore junior designers to help work on features. This involved many hours of coordination with them and mentoring them through design reviews as well as research activities. I was also responsible for making sure all designs aligned across other products and adhere to our Design System, which my team and I would contribute to.

Triple Diamond Design Process

Discover

Onsite / Remote Observations

Personas

Journey Maps

Pain Point Summary

Design

Design Sprints

Concept Designs

Concept Validation

Prioritize Features

Develop

Usability Testing

Prototype Designs

Review & Refine Designs

Design System Updates

Dev Support and QA

Alpha & Beta Testing

1. Discover

Discovery Research

This was the not the first project I had worked on at Mitchell, so everyone was already familiar with XD’s Design Process, and was onboard to do what was necessary to understand our users through discovery research. I planned and coordinated with the Product Manager and Client Managers to determine which customers, and specifically which end users, we wanted to observe as they performed their work using the current CEP. During the observations, we:
Understood the different roles of users of CEP by identifying and documenting workflows and journey maps of their activities
Identified areas for improvement within their journey by capturing the experience level of each activity and task
Noted the pain points and severity for each task.
We observed **six customers** during discovery. Five were onsite, and one was remote.
We observed **three personas**. Claims Adjuster, Claims Manager, and Claims Clerk.
Following the observation sessions, I created journey maps and workflows for the different personas. I created new persona pages to help inform our designs, and Pain Point Summary spreadsheets to help PM prioritize opportunities.

2. Design

Design Sprint

This is one of my favorite activities as a designer! Collaborating with Managers and Executives that you wouldn’t ordinarily interact with.
The purpose of the Design Sprint is to get alignment across XD, PM and Dev to decide on the Most Interesting Scenario that is then fleshed out into a Main Storyboard which XD will then go off and prototype and validate with customers. It first requires everyone to get up to speed on the discovery research results, and also takes everyone outside of their comfort zone by getting up out of their chair and sketching or commenting on the white board or wall post-it’s.
One challenge when working with so many busy individuals is they want to multitask, or rush through the exercises and finish quickly. This occurred during the design sprint. The Dev team wanted to use the Most Interesting Scenario as the Main Storyboard without going through the exercise of brainstorming ideas and fleshing out the Storyboard together. However, I convinced them the value of following the process and working together, and everyone agreed afterward that it was worthwhile.
We were able to outline three Main Storyboards that would be designed by XD and tested with customers:
Concept Validation of high-level flow
Usability Test of Approve a Bill
Usability Test of Edit a Bill

Concept Design and Validation

The concept design was broken up into two parts - the workflow and the features. We wanted to validate the new workflow with customers in a traditional way by demo’ing it and asking for their feedback. The responses from all five customers was unanimously positive. Here was one quote from an excited customer:

"New design is going to be a lot more efficient, especially with the new dashboard. I love the findings [in the Bill Overview page], the summarization will help make it more efficient for our folks, and allow them to make better decisions."

We also wanted to validate new features that we incorporated into the concept design, based on discovery research findings. We set up a remote concept validation session with customers to determine the value of each of the features in the concept design using the Kano method. Kano method works by asking a pair of opposite questions:

How valuable is it if you DO have the feature?
How valuable is it if you DON’T have the feature?

By capturing the data in a special spreadsheet, it returns the results for each feature to let you know, quantitatively, how important each feature is to all of the customers. This information is then used to determine the priority of the features.