Reimagining healthcare app home screen

HealthPartners is an integrated health care provider and health insurance company. I joined their UX design team in 2022 to help forge a new partnership with the mobile app team, which had previously been disconnected from the larger digital team.

Role:
Lead UX/UI Designer

Project duration:
Sept 2024–Mar 2025

Project

Redesigning HealthPartners’ app home screen to meet user needs, align more closely with the authenticated website experience, and apply the newly created digital design system.

The challenge

→ Small team

Although the app accounts for 34% of HealthPartners‘ authenticated traffic, the app team is very small, with only one Android and one iOS developer.

→ Three audiences

HealthPartners is both a health care provider and a health insurance company, which creates three audiences the app serves:

Patient-only: Someone who has insurance elsewhere, and receives care at HealthPartners (36% of users)

Member-only: Someone who has HealthPartners insurance, and receives care elsewhere (17% of users)

Member/Patient: Someone who both has HealthPartners insurance and receives care at HealthPartners (45% of users)

Survey

Partnering with our research team, we launched a survey on the HealthPartners app. These survey results served as foundational knowledge to help us with future research and design activities. We heard from 1,030 users.

Survey findings

The survey results helped us understand the main reasons each audience came to the app:

Top tasks for patient-only and member/patients:

Manage appointments
View test results
Message a care team provider

Top tasks for member-only:

View claims
Manage prescriptions
View plan balances

We also discovered the following pain points:

Difficulty navigating to pay a bill
Dislike being taken out of the app for certain tasks
Desire for a way to view proxy’s information on home screen

Concept testing

Informed by our survey results, I created two distinct concepts to test with users. My research partners conducted 1-hour interviews with 18 participants spanning the 3 audiences. Each interviewee saw both concepts in a randomized order.

Rather than showing participants the home screen at a moment in time, I proposed we walk each participant through a multi-week scenario:

“Imagine you have an upcoming appointment tomorrow. You sign into your app and this is what you see…”
“3 days later, you go to your appointment and receive an email about a new test result. You sign into your app and this is what you see…”
“3 weeks later, you don’t have any upcoming appointments, test results, or messages. You sign into your app and this is what you see…”

Walking users through this scenario allowed us to gather many more insights and helped us understand users’ appetites for dynamic vs. static content.

→ Dynamic concept

This option is our best data-informed guess at what the user signed into the app to do. It utilizes a “recent activity” section to serve relevant information. If the user has an upcoming appointment, it would show here. If they have a new test result, it would show here.

→ Consistent concept

This option keeps important tasks in a consistent location on the home screen while leveraging status indicators to show what’s new or may need attention.

Interviewees

Concept testing findings

When asked which home screen they would prefer:

0% of participants chose the dynamic concept
75% of participants chose the consistent concept
25% participants chose a combination of the two

Dynamic concept

 Pros

Clear appointment-related actions like “check-in,” “view details,” and “view after-visit summaries”

 Cons

Important tasks disappearing/reappearing
“Recent activity” title implied an activity that happened in the past

Consistent concept

 Pros

Persistent buttons for top tasks
Statuses to bring attention to what’s new
Less overwhelming than dynamic concept

 Cons

Less information was immediately available compared to dynamic concept

Feasibility

Keeping our limited development resources in mind, I requested access to a number of web products APIs from which I could gather information. This helped me understand feasibility from the start. Knowing we wouldn’t be creating new back-end systems, we needed to rely on other teams’ infrastructure to build this home screen.

Solution

Modular approach

I utilized a modular design that allowed us to build a few high-impact widgets to serve the three distinct audiences. Instead of creating three completely different home screens, we could mix and match widgets based on the audience.

This approach also allows for experimentation – testing which widgets perform well for which audience(s).

Puting it all together

Solution

Additional audience: proxy

This modular approach also lends itself well to an additional audience type: users that have proxy access to another person’s account (i.e., a parent managing their child’s healthcare). Devs can simply show/hide widgets based on a user’s access status.

Accessibility

Working with my accessibility partner, we created Figma text variables that correspond to iOS’s text scaling system. This allowed us to visualize and design for users who utilize this feature on their devices.

Learnings

This project reiterated the importance of having early feasibility conversations with developers and product teams. Without these conversations, I likely would have designed a solution that was good for our users but impossible to build.

My assumptions were also challenged during this project. I felt confident about the dynamic concept but learned that zero testers chose it as their preferred concept. 🙃

Next steps

Conduct satisfaction survey post-launch and compare findings with previous home screen design.
Watch analytics and iterate based on findings.