Discovery for Innovation Center

Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)

A workshop mural board showing sections for different audience types
As a Product Designer at Fearless, I spent 2 months leading a discovery effort for a refresh of the CMS Innovation Center website.

timeline

2 months

TEAM

Product Manager
Lead Designer (me!)
Product Designers (2)
Front-end Engineer

PARTNER

CivicActions

Context

The CMS Innovation Center was established by Congress in 2010 to identify ways to improve healthcare quality and reduce costs in the Medicare, Medicaid, and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) programs.

Problem

The CMS Innovation Center needed to improve comprehension of their content and increase enrollment in their programs. The site design had not been updated since 2014.

Goal

Before getting started, the team needed to clearly identify areas to improve and build a roadmap to prioritize work.

Discovery Activities

As the primary designer, I performed the majority of the discovery activities.

Quantitative

  • Created a UX Metrics Audit, which included site traffic, visitor metrics, and clicks

Qualitative

  • Direct user feedback through the Voice of Consumer tool
  • Accessibility Team’s research
  • Heuristics evaluation
  • Information architecture audit
  • Content audit and ROT analysis

Workshops & Interviews

  • Facilitated several workshops with stakeholders to identify pain points and areas for improvement
  • Conducted 2 user interviews with staff who manage content on the website
An image on the left shows the old version of the Innovation website and the image on the right shows the new CMS website.
The old Innovation site (left) had not been updated since 2014, and was migrating to the larger CMS ecosystem (right)

What we learned

By performing this extensive discovery work, we uncovered problems to solve for both stakeholders and users, but were met with additional challenges.

Uncovered the problems facing our stakeholders and users

  • Business Need: The website for the Center for Innovation at CMS is migrating to another site, with a new design system. The site needs to utilize the new design system, tie in with existing APIs and applications, and hopefully improve functionality of existing features.
  • User Need: Users need to more easily access the information they need, including access to login portals and timely updates.

Logistical challenges caused the team to pivot

  • We learned: After speaking with stakeholders and internal staff, we learned that the site was lacking usability and information architecture that cause frustration for both staff and users.
  • We pivoted: With a short deadline for migration, we had to pivot. The engineering team worked on a migration, the design team looked for iterative ways to add value and begin a design overhaul for the website.

Outcomes

As the discovery phase concluded, I ensured there was detailed documentation for future work.

Deliverables

  • Data repository with information gathered
  • Reorganized information architecture
  • User group profiles
  • Summary of recommendations for post-migration
  • Readouts and artifacts
  • Identified current unknowns for future research

Results

  • The site was successfully migrated before the deadline with a revised IA
  • The follow-up work was scoped with a roadmap
  • The 2.0 design work was begun following this discovery initiative
A journey map for non-participating organizations.
One of our workshops collected information for a user journey map

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