Health Insurance with TLC

MAKE HEALTHCARE APPEALING FOR THE YOUNG

HealthCo (name changed) is one of the largest Health Insurance companies. They wanted to freshen their brand and create an app that would appeal to a younger audience. All the internal efforts to create a new experience for their users had resulted in incremental improvements, but their app still felt very much like a stoic, health insurance app and they didn't see increased engagement among the 20s and 30s demographics.

HealthCo put their project on the Pirate ship to see if the innovate Pirates startups could make a radical difference that would make them instantly more appealing to the 20 and 30 year olds.
They laid out two high level goals for the app.

1. Create an app that would allow users to select their doctors based on community review and be able to connect with the doctor in real time.

2. Create a use case for the users to engage with the app to track their health on a regular basis, and not only when they have an ailment and need to see a doctor.

ENTER HAZE...

Haze is a startup that is part of the Pirates Network in Boston. The Haze team is building a healthcare app to bring transparent pricing to all. Pirates selected Haze based on Haze's excellent design portfolio and Health domain expertise.

 

STEPHEN BURKE

FOUNDER, HAZE

The first concepts that came up when we brainstormed HealthCo's app, were comfort, easy access and fun lifestyle. We all coalesced around the concept of comfort. When one's sick, one really wants some comfort and TLC and not anxiety about doctors, prescriptions and bills. So we branded the app Comfort and then we came up with the tag line "Healthcare with TLC". This really sets HealthCo apart from all the other Health Insurance companies, and makes it a friendly app the users would love to use as opposed to a stress inducing Health Insurance app.

In order to make the app relevant to users on a regular basis, we decided to make the focus of the app a healthy lifestyle, including fitness, nutrition and health topics, in addition to connecting with doctors.

JOINT SPRINTS

Once we'd fixed on the concept of comfort, we started with a joint backlog for Design and Development. This was user to estimate and prioritize our work effort over 8 weeks.. We worked through our backlog in weekly sprints, building the product out, experimenting with different design directions, and gradually refining the experience.

WE DESIGNED IN CODE

It was important for us to get to working software as quickly as possible. Ideas that seemed great in theory, and even looked great in flat comps, often broke down once we tried them out in code. By coding from the very beginning, we were able to short-circuit this process, accelerating design cycles and buying more time for iteration.