Honeybee

Enabling employees to use their benefits the way they want.

Project Overview

Honeybee Benefits is a product from Benecaid Insurance, a long time presence in the Canadian insurance industry.
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Honeybee is designed to bring the best parts of modern insurance - flexibility of account based platforms plus the security of an experienced, trusted benefits platform.‍
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Honeybee brings together health accounts, allowance accounts, and employee choice to enable coverage that fits more people better.

Skills Used

Product

  • Product Strategy
  • Agile team management
  • Product Roadmapping

Design

  • Visual Design
  • User Flows
  • Mind Mapping
  • Design Mentorship
  • Design Workshops

Research

  • User Research Strategy
  • User Interviews
  • User Testing
  • Research Synthesis

User Research

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Goals

  1. To gain a working understanding of the domain
  2. To validate the hypothesized opportunity
  3. To understand the user’s experience with the problem, framing, and their view of the landscape

Research Strategy

Our client had proposed a starting points for market segments to validate. Based on that we recruited a mixed sample of small businesses to interview who were at varying stages of insurance.

  1. Those who had yet to engage with an insurance provider. This helps us understand the mindset prior to purchase, such as early knowledge of insurance products.
  2. Those who already had. What informed their decision, what did they feel like they accomplished, and what did they learn?
Excerpts from research planning

For those who had already purchased insurance, we used that moment as a pivotal part of exploring what led to that point and what occurred afterwards. Our interview subjects ranged across industries, but maintained a small and midsize business target.

Excerpts from research results

We synthesized results into 4 themes to create a focused narrative we could all align around. One such theme was "Educational gaps". This was shared between those still shopping for insurance, and also those who had already purchased it. We felt this created an product opportunity and a design pillar for later work.

Key Insights

Primary users were likely to be a hybrid of office administrators, HR personnel, and founders. In many these were all one individual taking on many responsibilities until they could justify those specialized roles.

Research Insight

Primary users were likely to be a hybrid of office administrators, HR personnel, and founders. In many these were all one individual taking on many responsibilities until they could justify those specialized roles.

These individuals are rarely specialized for this task, and as a result have significant overhead for many of their tasks including deciding on insurance.

Recommendation

A design strategy that promoted learning, limited up-front choice, and shows constant feedback can create confidence in the process.

Research Insight

Reducing the cycle of employee-admin work can be a highlight for them. Chasing employees for physical documentation is taxing.

Recommendation

A design strategy that promoted learning, limited up-front choice, and shows constant feedback can create confidence in the process.

Product Design

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Goals

  1. To create a self-service platform for companies and employees that saves time for admins.
  2. To educate all parties throughout the process to increase comfort and confidence in the product.
User Flows - Employer Onboarding

As an insurance product Honeybee promised unique flexibility, but that also introduced further complexity into a product landscape already known for complexity. How could we communicate the product’s value without being intimidating?

Easing-in through an onboarding wizard
  1. To start the experience we designed a wizard pattern to ease users into the process. Individual questions with human readable language.
  2. As we heard that users often need to consult with others or find documentation, we introduce an easy resume function early on. By using a "magic link" pattern this also allows sharing of progress with other stakeholders which can help in decision making.
Configuration Designs
  1. To start the experience we designed a wizard pattern to ease users into the process. Individual questions with human readable language.
  2. As we heard that users often need to consult with others or find documentation, we introduce an easy resume function early on. By using a "magic link" pattern this also allows sharing of progress with other stakeholders which can help in decision making.

Version 2

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Key Challenge: Too much choice

With the second engagement we had much more user insight on the live platform. The original platform had tried to balance simplicity with choice, but the level of choice provided feedback that this level of choice created stress and lack of confidence. However these problems were tied to how the insurance products were designed, rather than the interface.

Solution: Simplifying the insurance products

We agreed to push this towards internal discussions with various stakeholders on how to address this fundamental issue. User experience couldn’t evolve without the core insurance product first changing, so that we could reflect the reality of the product.

Plan structures and policies were re-assessed based on the shared goal of improving customer experience.

The outcome was an even more aggressive approach in simplifying the core insurance product and the onboarding experience as two sides of the same coin. Consolidated choices, simpler language, and crucially less choices overall.

Scenarios as Narrative Guardrails

Through iterative design we came to lean on 3 scenarios that could represent plan configurations: Full Flexibility, Fully Traditional, and Balanced Plans.

These helped create easy to communicate defaults which users could optionally alter, but would otherwise greatly simplify onboarding for many.

Design System

From the beginning of the platform we had created a design system to grow and iterate on. Over time this has expanded to accommodate for constant iteration without drastically altering the user experience. The Design System is contained with Figma which allows us to share typography, components, and icon libraries between multi-platform designs.

Responsive Layouts

Late in the project there was a change in requirements regarding target screens. Initially we worked under the assumption of Desktop being the only layout needed for this information heavy workflow. However we received increasing comments regarding how Employees may want to finish this onboarding on the go.

Due to limited development resources we decided that simplifying the layouts would be more effective to meet our end goals. To accomplish this we simplified many 2-column design patterns down to single columns, and created guidance documents such as typography size tables that outline specs at each breakpoint.

Mobile App

While designed originally 2 years prior, the second version of Honeybee was to add a marketplace that gave members an opportunity save with local businesses. Plus other insights gained over that time period, we were able to redesign the mobile app to address usability issues and to expand functionality.

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