Case Study · Healthcare · Web
Leading end-to-end UX and information architecture for Washington State's School Employees Benefits Board open enrollment experience — turning a dense, fragmented health plan site into a clear, decision-ready digital ecosystem.
I served as the Lead UX Designer and Information Architect for the full SEBB redesign — owning how users moved through the experience, how complex health plan content was structured, and how stakeholders across content, legal, and brand were aligned on every decision.
Defined the complete IA across the SEBB journey — how pages connected, how content was grouped, and how users moved from awareness to confident enrollment decision.
Designed page frameworks, layouts, and user flows — from the SEBB landing page through plan comparison, provider search, and enrollment support.
Aligned content, legal, brand, and engineering teams on UX decisions — translating complex compliance requirements into design patterns without losing clarity for users.
Conducted pre-launch UX consistency reviews across all pages — verifying that patterns, hierarchy, and copy alignment held up across the full ecosystem before release.
Washington State educators making SEBB enrollment decisions are high-intent users — they need to understand complex health plan differences quickly, compare costs accurately, and feel confident before committing to a plan that affects their whole family.
Premera's existing SEBB pages weren't built for that. Content was spread across disconnected pages, comparison was difficult, and key decision-support information was buried in walls of text.
Plan information lived across multiple disconnected pages with no consistent pattern. Users had to navigate away and back repeatedly just to compare basic benefits — a critical failure for a decision-support tool.
No side-by-side comparison existed. Users were expected to hold plan details in memory while switching between pages — a cognitive load that drove uncertainty rather than confidence at the point of decision.
SEBB content must meet regulatory accuracy requirements — every benefit description, cost figure, and network statement is reviewed by legal. UX had to work within those constraints without sacrificing scannability.
Content, legal, brand, and engineering all had stakes in how the SEBB pages looked and read. Getting alignment required a structured review process and clear design rationale at every decision point.
Before designing a single page, I mapped the complete SEBB ecosystem — every entry point, every decision node, and every page that an educator would need to visit to confidently choose and enroll in a plan.
Catalogued every existing SEBB page, identified content gaps, fragmentation points, and navigation failures — presenting findings to stakeholders before a single wireframe was drawn.
Built the complete sitemap and page hierarchy — establishing how the landing page, plan pages, comparison, and enrollment support connected into a single coherent journey.
Created low-fidelity wireframes for every page type — validating structure with content, legal, and brand stakeholders before investing in visual design.
Applied Premera's brand system to the approved wireframe structures, then conducted a cross-page UX consistency review before launch to verify patterns held across the full ecosystem.
Click any annotation hotspot to understand the design decision behind each section. Switch to Final Design to see how the wireframe structure translated into the live experience.
The hero leads with the user's job-to-be-done ("find the right plan"), not Premera's brand. Enrollment deadline is surfaced prominently — tested as the #1 urgency driver for this audience.
Two CTAs serve two readiness states: "Compare Plans" for researchers, "Find a Doctor" for those who've already decided and want to validate their network. Neither competes with the other.
Three plan cards surface the most important differentiator (cost) immediately — with a featured state for the most commonly selected plan. Reduces time-to-comparison by eliminating the need to navigate to individual plan pages first.
Side-by-side comparison lives on the same page as the plan cards — no navigation required. Alternating row backgrounds and ✓/✗ symbols let users scan differences in under 10 seconds.
Early analytics from the first 30 days post-launch told a clear story: the redesigned experience was driving the right behavior. Users weren't bouncing — they were spending meaningful time on plan detail and comparison pages, which is exactly what a decision-support tool should produce.
The 3+ minute average time-on-page wasn't a sign of confusion — it was a signal of engaged evaluation. The IA and comparison patterns were working.
The Premera SEBB redesign demonstrates my ability to lead UX and information architecture across a complex, content-heavy domain — taking a fragmented ecosystem and restructuring it into a clear, decision-oriented experience that serves high-intent users under time pressure.
Aligning content, legal, brand, and engineering stakeholders around a shared UX vision — while keeping the design grounded in what users actually need at enrollment time — is the same kind of cross-functional delivery leadership that drives enterprise UX at any scale.