NY State of Health
Log In Redesign

UI/UX, Web Design

Senior UI/UX Designer

2021 - Present (Freelance)

Website

NY State of Health is the health insurance marketplace/dashboard overseen by the New York State government’s health department, providing healthcare access and coverage for millions of New York State residents in accordance with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Acts.

Since this is an ongoing venture between the state health department, NYSOH, and my employers at GDIT, there is only so much I can show because of the NDAs I had to sign.

This project addresses the fact that the NYSOH system doesn’t actually have a clear login call-to-action on their main site. What initially started as a small ask expanded, with some successes and failures, throughout the development process.

Project Goals & Considerations

The navigation of the consumer-side experience for the state’s signup website has not been updated since 2012. The proposed solution needed to focus on the following factors:

  • Provide a CTA where the user can login to their account
  • Reorganize existing navigation elements so they don’t interfere with an in-progress internal DOH project
  • Continue to emphasize multiple language options
  • Stay within current NYSOH/NYS branding

We also needed to account for additional limitations both from DOH and internally at GDIT before digging into the project’s designs:

  • Design’s front-end must be built in the not-really-responsive JS/CSS NYSOH base made back in 2012
  • Add an additional DOH-mandated list of links/navigation points
  • Take DOH’s requested link list and give it a more clear hierarchy of information
  • Find dead links in the live site and take them into account

Current Navigation Design

Current Navigation Design – Hover State

Current Login Flow

Proposed Redesign

Working in an iterative structure, myself and GDIT’s UI/UX lead went through only a handful of high fidelity revisions before we committed to our design decisions (thanks to our component libraries). In addition to addressing the project’s concerns, the aperture of our solution expanded to include:

  • Removing outdated banners and contact data from the existing navigation
  • Add a link/redirect for the upcoming Home Care program in the primary space of the navigation
  • Reorder dropdown links in secondary dropdown menus according to internal information hierarchy as well as soliciting department feedback
  • Ensure that the front-end solutions would be able to be adapted into a future mobile-optimization project (GDIT doesn’t have dedicated front-end devs, so this was all put on the design team by default)

Proposed Navigation Redesign

Proposed Navigation Redesign – Hover States

Proposed Login Redesign Flow

Conclusion

Ultimately, three things happened:

  1. Approval to have the Log In button act solely as a link to a dedicated NYSOH-branded login portal was shot down from DOH...
  2. ...and along with this decision, the Log In button was retrofitted into a dropdown with the dropdown links going to the respective info pages of the NYSOH program(s)
  3. GDIT’s existing tech deficit also ensured that the front-end JS/CSS base for our designs remain locked in perpetual Bootstrap amber

With all of the red tape considered (and decisions made out of our hands), I would say we accomplished as much as we could while continuing to force the modernization discussion internally at GDIT and with higher ups in the state government.

Projects
NYSOH – Log In Redesign
NYSOH – COVID-19 Alert Signup
NYSOH – Back Office Updates
Blue World
Tyson
USConnect
Noregon
C3
Agency/Misc. Projects