Kay Nguyen | Senior Product Designer

DA Townley

UX Design — UI Design

— CLIENT

Pacific Blue Cross

& DA Townley

via Domain7


— MY ROLES

UX Designer

UI Designer


— TIMELINE

2 months

Feb 2021-May 2021


— TOOLS

Sketch

Miro

A subsidiary of not-for-profit health insurance provider Pacific Blue Cross, DA Townley is Western Canada's largest third party administrator of group benefits and pension plans.


They provide group benefit programs to 1,000+ corporate and union clients and coverage for 100,000 employees/members and dependents in BC and Canada.


I was subcontracted by Domain7 to give the prior DA Townley website a modular facelift.

PROBLEM

Two of the problems the client wanted help with were:


1) merging 8 sites (DA Townley + 7 union sites) into 1-2 responsive and modular template designs; and,


2) mimicking the look and feel of (but not replicate) parent company website of Pacific Blue Cross

GOAL

The focus of this project was the technical migration, rather than a complete design overhaul. So, this goal dictated a lot of the scope.

AUDIENCE

There were 2 main audiences for this project:

  • 1) For the parent site:
  • Employers and brokers who want to provide insurance plans and pension benefits to their employees or union members


  • 2) For the child sites:
  • Union members who want to be updated on news, plan updates, and insurance resources

PROCESS

Part of my process for this project included doing a review and comparison of each of the 8 sites, including the PBC site. I sketched out the current layouts of each site and audited which areas of content were similar and which were different. This informed what information could be chunked together, what was unique, and where content could possibly fit within a template layout across all the sites. After that, I started sketching and dove into designing UI components. 


Throughout each stage and process of the project, I collaborated with the developers and the client, to make sure that each iteration made sense, was in scope, and met the goals of the project.

DESIGN RATIONALE

3 key considerations helped me arrive at the final designs:

1) Design System

I made a mini design system to implement changes across device sizes to parent and child sites faster. Since DA Townley and Pacific Blue Cross have long-standing partnerships with Domain7, creating a design system of components helped set up the team for future work and updates as needed.

2) Content Blocks

For this template project, it was really important that there was an emphasis on modular design. This was to ensure that the template could work across all 8 sites, that content blocks could be added or subtracted as needed, and that there was flexibility to make updates to currently undefined content in the future.

3) Mobile Responsive

In conversation with the client, mobile responsiveness was at the forefront. This led to making decisions around how the content blocks were laid out, the interaction behaviour (such as what's clickable within the card), and how elements might look differently on desktop vs. mobile (such as the menus).


RESULTS

Overall the project was a success and we received feedback from the client stating that the designs "hit the nail on the head". After the project wrapped up, the Domain7 Director of Delivery reached out to me an expressed amazement at the project excellence, particularly among a team of folks across multiple timezones who had not worked together before. This project also resulted in me receiving a full-time job offer at Domain7.

REFLECT

In reflecting on what made this project so successful, three things contributed to its success:


  1. 1) Communication
  2. The team was separated by three different time zones and working hours, so asynchronous and constant communication was key with this project.
  3. Additionally, the team had never worked with each other before, so things that found helpful was to reach out out for 1:1s at the beginning of the project, maintaining a posture of curiosity and assuming positive intent, and writing daily progress notes on Slack.


  1. 2) Organization 
  2. There wasn’t really a dedicated project manager on the team, so our team took it upon ourselves to self-manage based on each of our strengths and what worked for everyone. Each person was really clear on their roles and responsibilities, as well as had high respect for each other's expertise.


  1. 3) Clear scope alignment
  2. There was a bit of scope creep in the later stages of the project when presenting to the client, so going back to the goals, walking through the design rationale with the end users in mind, and presenting trade-offs really helped to keep everyone aligned on the scope of the project within the given timeframe.