Starship
Make an HSA deposit
User experience
The “make a deposit” user flow sits within the app’s HSA team under the Starship banking sector. From a bird’s-eye view, HSA is a bit like the red-headed stepchild of the app. It doesn’t behave like its sister benefits, which come ready-to-use. It requires a heavier cognitive lift from the user and more hands-on interaction. Where other benefits in the app simply load with money at a regular cadence, HSA requires the user to understand how it works in order to make it work for them. Most imperative to the HSA experience, it requires the user invest their own money. This particular experience takes the user through depositing their own money into their HSA account, which they are then able to access as-needed.
Company background
UnitedHealth Group recently acquired a small startup called Starship. At the time of acquisition, Starship was working to change the way people use their health and lifestyle benefits by creating an app that’s as aesthetically pleasing and it is easy-to-use. Upon acquisition, the Starship team was tasked with broadening the scope to include additional lifestyle benefits in a rebranded app that looks good enough to entice Gen Z, is accessible enough for The Silent Generation, and uses language that non-native english speakers can easily comprehend.
My role
My initial role was to edit existing working screens to meet UX writing best practices and brand standards. As I delivered on this request I was able to expand my impact to strategize with the team’s product designers, product managers, UX researchers, and engineers. Our strategy work then expanded at a systems level to encompass the full banking experience.
Strategy
Make something as personal as saving healthcare money easy for people of all financial literacy levels to understand. From first-time savers to those well-versed in HSAs, we want to empower everyone to easily and confidently invest their own money. We also want our user to know they can trust our product to protect their money. In lieu of additional education to instill user trust, we opted for a clean, simple, intuitive user experience to spark confidence and trust in the product.
At a basic level we began by leaning on existing content patterns to guide our designs. With these guidelines in place we utilized research insights to understand our users’ needs, then completed complex comparative content audits to learn how other companies effectively design and speak to a range of HSA experiences.
Error messages
I approach error messages with four guiding principles: clearly state the problem, don’t blame the user, avoid apologizing unless we’ve really messed up, offer a clear solution. Below you’ll see a variety of error messages, ranging from most complex to most straightforward. The first includes multiple possible issues and multiple possible solutions (not ideal but it’s the card we were dealt). The following error message includes multiple issues with one solution. The next error messages communicates one problem with one solution. The final error message is informational and requires no action from the user.
Please note line-items in this table are interactive. Tap + to open an item and view additional information.
What went right
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Many of the projects in this company work at warp speed, meaning we often don’t have the opportunity to give each user experience the time and strategy level it deserves. This product experience had a launch date far enough in the future that we were able to take our time.
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The HSA team is one of the most streamlined teams in the company. This allowed me to work collaboratively with a team that inherently saw value in a content design practice—which wasn’t always the case in Starship product teams.
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As we designed, we identified areas where we could improve user comprehension. While we weren’t able to immediately implement additional user experiences, we were able to backlog them and begin additional work at a later date
What challenged us
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This was more of a personal challenge than a team challenge. I was thrown into HSA without any knowledge of how it worked. I experienced a significant learning curve in understanding the intricacies of HSA, which forced me to put a fair amount of extra work to feel confident in my product knowledge.
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As I worked with the designers we identified instances where design could better support user comprehension. However, our design systems leader didn’t have the bandwidth to address our desired design changes, which meant changes we wished to make were backlogged for post-launch.
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The Starship team is incredibly lean. Because of this, they began working with their first copywriter well into their production, I was then hired as their second writer—and first UX writer. This meant style guidelines were also incredibly lean at the time of this project and there was no dedicaed UX guideline to follow.