Autumn is a B2B, internal insurance application, developed by Lincoln Financial Group, for Case Managers to manage short term disability claims submitted by customer employees (also known as Claimants).
MY ROLE(S) FOR THIS PROJECT:
• Field Research
• Experience Design & Facilitation
Case Managers have a lot of tasks on their plates due to high call volume and limited budget to hire more call support. This leads to frustration as claimants are often sent to voicemail and have to wait for a call back.
The majority of a Case Manager's time is dedicated to manually calculating employee entitlement (the time off available to an employee through their insurance benefit). Manually calculating entitlement is a complex process that is dependent on:
• Changing state regulations
• Employee work schedule
• Intermittent v. continuous benefits
On top of this, Case Managers deal with a complex and sluggish network application to pull in a Claimant's information.
THE GOAL:
To build a tool for Case Managers that automates the calculation process, giving them back valuable time. Since the process of calculating entitlement was very date driven, it made sense to build a tool that could calculate based on the date of a projected absence.
THE PROCESS:
• Field research to understand Case Manager and Claimant pain points.
• Team design sessions (product management, engineering, and case managers) to brainstorm/sketch ideas.
• My self and another designer created prototypes to test.
• I observed participants and took notes while a researcher moderated testing.
• Design iteration based on testing results and (more often) engineering feedback.
THE OUTCOME:
The launch of our calculation tool was well received the first two days but then there was a sudden drop of usage with our test group. Our tool had a major flaw. We designed the tool to pull date of first absence from existing claims in the system but didn’t account for new claimants with no absences recorded. Without a way to enter a date of first absence, no calculation could take place.
Luckily, we found an immediate solution to fix this by adding logic for the tool to display a date field when no date of first absence is detected.
Case Managers were now able to easily calculate and relay entitlement information to Claimants in less time than it would have taken them to manually calculate it.
(Click on a thumbnail to view larger)
Dashboard - Case managers can view a current snapshot of an employee's claims and benefit life span
All Claims View - Where case managers can view active and past claims and there details
Calendar View - Where case managers can see a bird's-eye-view of an employee's entitlement and also make adjustments to their work schedule
BEFORE IMAGES (Click on a thumbnail to view larger)
The claims journey
