Enterprise Healthcare UX Research | UHC M&R | MTAG

Member Touchpoint Optimization Application

UHC's Medicare members were drowning in communications. No one could see why — or stop it. I built the research that changed that.

View research process View business impact

175M

Annual touchpoints

$22.6M

Revenue protected

6×

Stakeholder reviews/yr

71.8

SUS score

Good usability

Project overview

When someone is navigating healthcare for themselves or a family member, every touchpoint is a moment of high-stakes decision-making — this research mapped and optimized those moments across a member journey serving a largely senior population. UnitedHealthcare's Medicare & Retirement division was sending over 175M member communications annually — but had no centralized way to see where campaigns overlapped, which members were being overloaded, or what the downstream business risk actually was.

I was brought in as lead UX researcher when the Member Touchpoint Advocacy & Governance (MTAG) team needed to understand the problem well enough to build a solution. The stakes were clear: unchecked communication overload was threatening member retention, inflating inbound call volume, and putting $22.6M in revenue at risk.

What started as a research engagement became the foundation for an entirely new internal platform — the Member Touchpoint Optimization application — that gave MTAG teams visibility and control they'd never had before. Its headline outcomes — a reported $22.6M in protected revenue and a 6× jump in stakeholder optimization reviews (2 → 12+ a year) — were tracked by the business; my research scoped the problem and built the foundation behind them.

Role: Lead UX Researcher

Methods: User Interviews, Observation, Usability Testing, SUS Survey

Stakeholders: MTAG, Product, Engineering, Senior Leadership

Impact: Retention, Campaign Performance, Operational Efficiency

My contributions

I led this project as the sole researcher, which meant every methodological decision was mine to make — and defend.

My first call was to start with direct observation rather than surveys. The MTAG workflow was too complex and too manual to understand from self-report alone; I needed to see it running in real conditions. That choice surfaced the bottlenecks that shaped everything that followed — specifically, that analysts were spending the majority of their time assembling data before any actual analysis could begin.

From there, I led the full research arc: structured user interviews to map pain points and workflows, close collaboration with design on prototyping, moderated usability testing to surface friction, and a SUS survey to validate experience quality quantitatively. I synthesized findings into journey maps and stakeholder storyboards, and presented recommendations directly to product managers, engineers, and VP-level leadership.

Throughout, I used AI tools deliberately — to accelerate planning, summarize testing sessions, and cluster feedback — so I could spend more time on the interpretive work that actually required a researcher.

Why this matters

175M

member touchpoints in 2022

Without a centralized way to understand touchpoint volume and campaign overlap, teams struggled to identify which communications contributed to member overload. This created risks for retention, campaign performance, inbound call volume, and overall member experience.

PAIN POINT

Fragmented touchpoint data and limited visibility into campaign overlap forced slow, manual investigation to understand member communication.

OPPORTUNITY

Centralize touchpoint and campaign data into a single view so teams can quickly identify and reduce communication overload.

BUSINESS RISK

Unchecked communication overload threatened member retention, campaign performance, and inbound call volume.

Research approach with AI-enhanced activities

Journey map of the Member Touchpoint research approach across four phases — user interviews, prototyping, testing and observation, and iteration — showing the people involved, activities, AI tools used, the research arc, and the purpose for each phase.

Research phases

User interviews

Prototyping

Testing & observation

Iteration

People involved

Data analysts · MTAG Team Director · UX researcher (me)

UX researcher (me) · UX designer

UX researcher (me) · UX designer · Dev team

Activities & steps

Engaged directly with target users early in the cycle to understand their core pain points, needs, and workflows.

Translated user insights into tangible, interactive models — turning findings into a testable prototype.

Put the prototype in front of users and observed how they navigated it, what confused them, and where they got stuck.

Analyzed the feedback and behavioral data from testing and adjusted the product design to resolve identified friction points.

AI tools used

ChatGPT — interview guide drafting, faster documentation

Figma — built interactive prototypes for testing

Miro AI — affinity clustering, theme generation from observation notes · NVivo — automated summarization and theme detection across session notes

Automated feedback analysis — transcription, friction-point tagging, clustering complaints into feature requests & sentiment analysis to prioritize fixes

Research arc

Empathy & discovery

Creation

Observation

Refinement

Purpose & insights

Accelerated planning and documentation while keeping interview structure researcher-led

Turned insights into a tangible artifact the team could put in front of real users.

Surfaced behavioral patterns faster and identified recurring themes across participants; all outputs reviewed and validated by the researcher

Resolved friction points through AI-assisted analysis, fueling continuous iterative development.

Understanding the MTAG workflow

A journey map from the user interviews, tracing how the MTAG team turned touchpoint data into recommended actions — and why that cycle was so costly to run.

MTAG Team journey map across data collection, decomposition, and strategy development

Gather data →Validate data →Analyze touchpoints →Identify risks →Recommend actions

Sequential and manual

Every review ran the full gather, validate, analyze, and recommend sequence by hand — with no way to shortcut or parallelize the steps.

Front-loaded on data prep

Most of each cycle went to assembling and reconciling data before any analysis could begin.

Effort grew with volume

Because the cycle repeated end to end for every campaign, rising touchpoint volume meant linearly rising effort.

What we learned

Users lacked a single source of truth for member touchpoint data.

Communication overload was difficult to detect before campaign launch.

Manual investigation significantly slowed decision-making.

Teams needed member-level context to assess touchpoint relevance.

"I know the data is available. I just need a quicker turnaround to get the data I need."

Hunter Illsley

Business Data Analyst, Member Touchpoint Advocacy & Governance (MTAG)

Visualizing the human impact

Research findings are only as powerful as the decisions they unlock. To move stakeholders from data to action, I translated the research into a narrative video — introducing two personas that made the problem human and immediate.

Judith is a retired teacher and UHC Medicare member managing multiple chronic conditions. She's struggling with technology, and the volume of outbound communications from UHC has left her confused, overwhelmed, and increasingly disengaged.

Janet is the MTAG analyst responsible for protecting members like Judith. She has the will to help — but without a centralized view of touchpoint data, she can't see the problem clearly enough to act on it.

Stakeholder narrative video — Judith & Janet: Member Touchpoint Optimization

Why this artifact mattered

The video walked senior leadership through both perspectives, making visible what the data alone couldn't: that communication overload wasn't just an operational inefficiency — it was affecting real members' lives and their trust in UHC.

• Turned touchpoint data into a human story leadership could see and feel

• Drew a direct line from Janet's frustration to the Member Touchpoint Optimization platform as the solution

• Helped secure stakeholder alignment and executive buy-in for the platform investment

Designing the Member Touchpoint Optimization platform

Working closely with product managers, engineers, and senior designers, I translated research insights into actionable design recommendations that informed the development of the Member Touchpoint Optimization platform.

Member Touchpoint Optimization platform design with member, campaign and touchpoint views

Member filters

Help users narrow the analysis by member characteristics and population segments.

Campaign filters

Allow teams to isolate campaigns, vendors, channels, and program categories.

Touchpoint visualization

Surface communication volume patterns across time and member groups.

Risk identification

Help teams identify bombardment risks before they affect member experience.

Testing and iteration

MVP usability testing

Evaluated whether users could complete core analysis tasks.

Research findings

Identified friction points, unclear labels, and workflow gaps.

Design recommendations

Shared actionable recommendations with design and engineering teams to improve product usability.

SUS survey

Quantitative usability feedback used to validate experience quality.

Research validation

Quantitative results

71.8

Grade B

Good usability rating

50th–85th percentile ranking

0–100 SUS scale

Qualitative feedback

User friendly
Empowering
Sufficient
Game-changing tool

User interviews and usability testing indicated that the platform helped users feel more confident and efficient when analyzing member touchpoint data.

This is a game-changer! Now, I don't need to wait for multiple weeks just to get a dataset from the other team.

Hunter Illsley

Business Data Analyst (MTAG)

The Member Touchpoint Optimization is transformational for MTAG. We now have scalable insights to understand exactly when and where the largest points of touchpoint abrasion are occurring.

Donna Arriaga

Director, Marketing M&R Product