Jess Veldhuis UX Designer

Additional Coverage Hub

Digital Insurance Store

— PROJECT NAME

Additional Coverage Hub


— ROLE

UX Researcher

UX Designer

UX Writer


— DATE

May 2024 – January 2025

The Additional Coverage Hub (ACH) is an online store where plan members can purchase additional Life and Critical Illness insurance. Plan members can learn about products, get a quote, and apply in one flow. The project was split into three phases: Discover, Quote, and Apply.


The project was already in progress when I started my role, and led by the group benefits marketing team. I contributed to user research, high-fidelity mockups, and content improvement.

Challenges

The landing page and product pages for the Additional Coverage Hub (ACH) were already in high-fidelity when I started my role. The design was created according to an outline provided by a different team. This presented several issues:

  • - Dense content
  • - Poor naming (original name of the store was confusing)
  • - Limited UX input for the landing and product pages
  • - Complicated medical questions and legal requirements

User Research

One of my first tasks on the ACH project was to lead moderated user testing on the landing and product pages. I created a research plan to evaluate what participants found challenging about the initial design.


Key insights:

  1. 1. Users didn’t understand the original store name or expect to buy insurance.
  2. 2. Long pages with heavy text made product information hard to find difficult to skim.
  3. 3. Ambiguous headings made it difficult to parse information and digest it.


Content & Naming Improvements



To address the pain points uncovered through user testing, I

  • - I restructured the product information from marketing into tabbed layouts, making content easier to scan, while my coworker created the visuals.
  • - I suggested heading re-writes for clarity and alignment with marketing's content.
  • - Upper management addressed the store name after reviewing our research data and decided on a more descriptive title for the store.


Outcome

When we retested using the new design with tabs, participants better understood the store’s purpose, and no one had trouble navigating through the tabs and finding the information they needed.

UX Improvements

Medical Questions & Terms and Conditions

  1. 1. Medical questions
  2. Problem: For clients to be able to purchase coverage above a certain amount or outside of an enrolment window, they were required to answer medical questions. The questions provided were long and wordy. Eligibility rules also varied depending on the window. We were not able to change any of the content.

  4. Solution: I created a one-question-at-a-time flow with bulleting for readability. To help with this, I made a custom component that became a part of our company's design system. The flow also ends if a user answered "yes" to any of the questions as that immediately disqualified them from additional coverage.


This flow tested well with users. Many of them expected more questions and appreciated not having to answer any further questions once they were already disqualified from coverage.

  1. 2. Terms & Conditions
  2. Problems:
  3. A) The review and pay screen needed to display the all plan member’s information – name, contact information, and medical question responses. This resulted in a very long screen, particularly for mobile users, with payment information at the bottom. I wanted to keep everything confined to one screen to reduce the amount of clicking-through required.


B) I was presented with lengthy terms and conditions by the legal team with the requirement that they just had to ensure they were presented to the client. We also wanted to factor in development issues that the team had faced in the past with forced scrolling.



  1. Solutions:
  2. A) I relied on accordions to collapse and expand information. When a client landed on the page, everything was displayed, but they are provided with the option to hide the sections as they scroll through. I included accordions inside the medical question section as well to show or hide additional context.

  4. B) Terms & Conditions are presented to the clients in a side sheet that slides out from the right on desktop and tablet and up from the bottom on mobile. Users can access the Ts&Cs via a hyperlink or checkbox validation. They were not forced to scroll to the bottom of the terms and conditions in order to proceed. This ensured legal compliance without adding friction to the user flow or complicating the code.

Accordions used to collapse information and limit scrolling.

Terms & conditions side sheet

My Project Impact

Through this project, I improved clarity and reduced cognitive load in a traditionally dense, insurance-heavy process. I also created scalable design patterns including tabbed layouts, custom flows, and legal side sheets that can be applied to other insurance products in the future.


I also learned how to advocate for UX in a marketing-driven project, negotiate compromises with development and legal, as well as design scalable solutions within complex requirements.


Accessibility was another key focus: while our components already met accessibility standards, I ensured any content I wrote was kept at a grade 8 reading level and aligned with the company’s communication style guide.

Final Note

The Additional Coverage Hub has faced delays and as of Sept 2025 has not been launched yet. However, the design work was completed through all phases.