PROJECT SUMMARY

Accessibility guidelines are becoming increasingly important as more people rely heavily on digital products to live, survive, and work. UHC ensures all its internal and external users can function and utilize these electronic products equally, regardless of individual abilities.

MY ROLE

Lead WCAG 2 consultant, design system maintenance and updating, screen updating and redesign.

USERS

Our primary users are the claims examiners, employees, and internal United Healthcare (UHC) users.

TIMELINE AND BUDGET

This project is past the initial phases but is still ongoing.

THE PROCESS

EMPATHIZE

Our goal of understanding the business pain points more thoroughly was to align the goals of business and user experience in the hope that aligning both would create fewer barriers as we came up with potential solutions.

We spent most of our empathize phase analyzing the user journey, watching people walk through the process, and observing which steps caused the most confusion. We documented our findings and created an empathy map with observations.

DEFINE

After we decided on our direction with a “How might we?” we worked” it into a problem statement: “How might we improve ADA compliance of our internal-facing products with minimal to” line and budget to make our work environment”nt more access”ible for differently abled people?”

IDEATE

Knowing we would need to keep our users front and center throughout the design process, we created a user persona representing all of our research and relevant interview participants who work at the company in various roles.

PROTOTYPE

We began by updating the design system after assessing which components were compliant and which needed tweaking. We made sure all base components were updated and recreated the current screens with changes to various font sizes and colors, improving visual hierarchy and ensuring color contrast.

TESTING

We brought in stakeholders and internal users to validate design decisions or give constructive feedback on each design change. We focused on time on task and continue to receive feedback from Claims managers about the application's user-friendliness.

OUTCOMES AND LESSONS

More work is being done in the current PI cycle to remake the application and make it ADA-compliant. Still, progress in the application to explain auria labels and keyboard shortcuts to the development team was very beneficial in many parts of this ongoing project.