MAXMEDICARE: END-TO-END PRODUCT DESIGN
S1E2: Becoming a low-key expert in US Medicare and designing a Community Product for 65+ year olds
UX Design
Animation
YouTube Channel
Sales funnel
Performance Marketing
SEO
Subject Matter Expertise
End-to-end Problem Solving
Brand Storytelling
User Research
Design Iteration
Consistent UI
Design System
MaxMedicare was a great person's brainchild. It's the thrill of innovation that might've kept them up at night. Executed very gracefully by a talented team of developers, they wanted some way to increase website traffic.
Medicare, if you know, is the CMS (US Government) administered Health Insurance that US seniors above 65 years and people with certain disabilities become eligible for.
Pretty complex laws and rules exist around it. Making it difficult for seniors to navigate this big change in their life most of them face right on their 65th birthday. Think Indian Income Tax Laws level complicated.
Here's a video I produced (from a long list of others) to promote the product that can help explain Medicare.
Brief was simple: Make it look simple and fun. So that cognitive overload and resistance to complex information is curbed.
My role in the team
I joined the team as an Animator, Illustrator and Graphic designer. However, I was trusted with the Product UX as well.
What was the business model and how did we position ourselves?
MaxMedicare was envisioned to become an exclusive Medicare community where the Senior Citizens can post their own questions (without divulging PHI) and get answers from Experts in the field. Experts are Medicare Insurance Agents who will have Premium access to the platform. By answering questions, they will gain the rep, and potentially generate leads for business.
MaxMedicare was uniquely positioned as an Expert themselves. With plethora of home-grown content on social media platforms about Medicare. Answering important questions, guiding senior citizens to the growing community.
MaxMedicare also had proper Insurance plan lists based on the User's zipcode that they could compare and ultimately contact an agent to buy. There were other tools designed to make their lives simpler.
Here are multiple ads that I conceptualized and produced that might help you understand it better.
Step 1 - YouTube videos to position as an expert
A Medicare agent who was our consultant then, provided me scripts.
I learnt everything I could about Medicare. Then I developed a consistent visual language for the animations.
Then used YouTube thumbnail design to create a consistent branding. Added multiple links and subscribe CTAs and links redirecting traffic to the website.
Optimized the YouTube experience by SEO-optimized Descriptions, Captions and Chapter markers. Channel landing page had branding of its own!
Here's my favourite video from the series.
Step 2 - Taking users to role-targeted landing pages and incentivizing signup
Here's what the Agent Landing Page looked like. It was designed to explain in simple words — "What will I gain if I sign up?"
Step 3 - Strong Organic and Paid Social media outreach to lure both buyers and sellers
SEO efforts, PPC — Long term organic funnel setup efforts, with short term monetary boosts to increase conversion.
What is engaging to the Boomers and Gen X? Here's what we found out.
65+ US Females are more active on social media than males.
They don't want to be scared by Medicare. They need to be lured in through promise of community. Articles like "RVing as snowbirds with Medicare" gained more traction than the ones about Medicare insights.
When it comes to images, the seniors are more likely to click on an actual human face rather than an illustrated one, in most of the cases. We found out through Meta Ads A/B Testing and used our insights to improve campaign performance by almost 2% pts.
Step 4 - Providing Value that increases our NPS (Net Promoter Score)
What does conversion here? It is different for our 2 sets of users.
For the senior citizen user, if they create an account and ask their question here and get their answer or further help — their journey is complete. Hopefully then they spread the word and become our Promoter.
For the agent, this is an exclusive invite-only community for agents to mingle in and increase their social rep without fearing being sued for unsolicited selling efforts. They have 'verified' badges akin to Twitter and personal business pages we'll automatically generate for them based on their data.
Think LinkedIn based Profile Design, Reddit based focused knowledgeable community and Quora type QnA community — merged with being a marketplace with tools to help you close that sale.
According to Medicare Laws, you CANNOT approach a senior and give unsolicited advice. They will have to give you explicit permission to contact them regarding Medicare. Only then can the agent contact them legally.
And our platform helped them get that. If a user was satisfied/not satisfied with an answer, they could potentially want to talk more about it. We gave CTAs to them to contact an agent near their area. Only after they gave explicit permission, we broadcasted their lead.
Agents would receive free lead credits. Leads would be differentiated in Gold Silver and Bronze based on their lucrativeness and specificity to them. Agents could unlock leads after buying credits.
Storytelling: Positioned Product as better than a Google Search
A Google Search can potentially generate 10,500,000 results in milliseconds. However, for a thing as complex as Medicare, the support of a community seemed essential.
MaxMedicare empowered them to post questions in an expert community. Think stack overflow, but for Medicare.
But we strived to increase our user's Google experience better as well.
We devised the QnA structured way of packaging data so that Google web crawlers can identify them and feature them.
Plot twist: The product couldn't launch…
Despite ardent efforts from the whole team, we couldn't gain enough traction. The things that probably could've been done better are:
Incentivized User Research
Problem precedes Solution
Influencer Promotion
WhiteHat SEO strategies
Featured Inbound links
Corporate tie-ups
This could have spread the word of mouth better. As Seniors are not that tech-savvy and always at risk of getting scammed — gaining their trust by only online methods failed. We also targeted people with their parents 65+ and those users actually used our site better.
Key takeaway
I had an intense learning experience on the job. New things that I learnt are:
Brand Storytelling
Visual Thinking
Digital Marketing
Competitive Conversion Strategies
Developer Handoff
HTML CSS React (basics)
Blog UX
Social media UX
SEO Strategies
Ad-based Revenue model design
Google Analytics
CRM
Cut-throat Campaign Optimization