CLIENT

DURATION

14 Weeks

TOOLS

Sketch

Creating UnitedHealthcare's Design System for Email Marketing Campaigns

OCTOBER 2023 - JANUARY 2024

I led my team in developing a comprehensive design system for UnitedHealthcare's email marketing campaigns. This 14-week project aimed to streamline their design process and ensure brand consistency across various business units. Built on Sketch, the system offers a balance of flexibility to accommodate unique needs and a structured foundation for efficient campaign creation. To empower the UHC design team, I conducted in-depth tutorials and created a comprehensive reference document for ongoing system utilization and maintenance.

Context

Overview

UnitedHealthcare, a leading US health insurer, caters to diverse customer segments through dedicated business units. These segments include individuals, families, employers, retirees, military personnel, and Medicare/Medicaid beneficiaries.

Within UHC, the Medicare Advantage (MA) and Medicare Supplement (MedSupp) units share an email production team. This team manages a high volume of email campaigns throughout the year. Each email undergoes a multi-step review process involving marketing, email teams, creative teams, and legal departments.

Emails adhere to strict branding guidelines specific to each business unit and comply with UHC's overarching legal requirements.

My Role

My role was to lead UX efforts for a cross-functional team of strategists, project managers, and developers. To understand user needs, I conducted interviews with representatives from each email production team (marketing, email, creative, legal). These insights revealed pain points and opportunities for a design system to improve efficiency, brand consistency across emails, and overall organization for both Medicare Advantage and Medicare Supplement email campaigns.

User Interviews

Following discussions with the UnitedHealthcare client to grasp the project scope, I conducted user interviews to delve deeper into each of the four team's needs and identify the core design objectives for the system.

My interviews identified the core users of the design system: the email and creative teams. However, the benefits would extend to marketing (campaign development) and legal (compliance) teams if the system addressed their needs as well.

The email team's biggest pain point was starting each email from scratch. They lacked a system for reusing elements or referencing past campaigns, leading to longer design times. This inefficiency also impacted the creative team, who struggled with inconsistent image sizes and fonts from the email team. Further complicating matters, the creative team needed to adapt designs for different business units with varying branding guidelines.

Opportunities for the Design System

These insights highlighted key opportunities for the design system. It could establish a central repository of reusable email components and templates, allowing the email team to build upon past work. Additionally, the system could offer branding consistency to accommodate the different business units' guidelines, easing the creative team's workload. Finally, considering legal requirements within the system could streamline approval processes for the legal team.

Create a design system with a shared set of email modules that empowers efficient email creation, ensures brand consistency for both business units, and guarantees legal compliance to expedite the approval process.

⚡ DESIGN OBJECTIVE

Module Development

Ideation

Leveraging insights from user interviews, I began sketching core email modules for the UHC design system. While email rendering can vary across clients (Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail), certain core components consistently display well. These foundational modules would standardize the design and ensure a consistent user experience across platforms.

Layout Zones

The design system was built off of a foundational email layout with five designated zones. This ensures consistency across all UHC emails produced through the system. Each email must include a header and footer, with a prominent primary module for the core campaign message. Optionally, secondary and tertiary modules can be added for additional information, offering flexibility for complex campaigns.

Module Types

After my initial sketches, I created low-fidelity mockups of the three core module types.

Primary Modules: These modules convey the main message of the email campaign. They typically combine an image, headline, descriptive text, and a prominent call-to-action button.

Secondary Modules: Designed for maximum flexibility, these modules support the primary message with supplemental information. They can mirror the primary module's design or take various forms like checklists, bulleted lists, multi-column layouts, card displays, etc.

Tertiary Modules: Focused on specific functions, these modules are often used for essential details like contact information or follow-up instructions.

Client Feedback

Following design best practices, I prioritized early and frequent client feedback. I presented the low-fidelity wireframes of the core modules to validate their alignment with UHC's goals. The client's positive response confirmed the modules' effectiveness. They also provided valuable insights that led to the addition of several secondary modules, further enriching the design system's functionality.

Building the Design System

Having identified the necessary modules, I began constructing the system within Sketch. However, to accommodate the branding needs of both Medicare Advantage and Medicare Supplement units, I opted for a more efficient approach. Instead of duplicating the entire file, I leveraged Sketch's capabilities to create a single, scalable design system with branding flexibility. This allowed for easy customization of each module to adhere to the specific branding guidelines of each business unit.

The Approach

Doubling for Each Brand

For every module, I designed a version that matched the Medicare Advantage branding and a version that matched Medicare Supplement's branding. The visual below exemplifies this adaptability, showcasing how a single module can be stylized to fit both brands while retaining its core structure and functionality.

Color Testing & Accessibility

Beyond aesthetics, I prioritized accessibility for UHC's diverse audience. While leveraging brand colors provided by their creative team, I tested each color combination to ensure they met WCAG color contrast guidelines. This guarantees that the final email design is accessible to all users, regardless of visual abilities.

Sketch File

I was aware of the fact that the Sketch file needed to be well-organized and easy for the UHC team to maintain and adapt as their email needs evolve. Therefore, the system includes clear sections for:

Foundations (including structure, typography and colors)
Elements (including icons, button styles and other repeated elements)
MedSupp Modules
MA Modules
New Email Design Page where users can drag-and-drop modules onto a canvas

Structure

Typography

Footer

Structure

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Module Organization

Accommodating hundreds of modules within the design system presented an organizational challenge. To ensure efficient module retrieval, I implemented a meticulous categorization system. This system sorts modules by business unit (MedSupp or MA), type (primary, secondary, tertiary, footer, or header), style, color (white or blue for dark mode), and viewport (mobile or desktop). This granular approach empowers UHC's team to locate the perfect module with ease, streamlining the email creation process.

The design system empowers the UHC team to create emails efficiently. Pre-built modules can be easily dragged and dropped into designated desktop and mobile frames. Users can then customize the content within each module, replacing placeholder text and images to match the specific campaign. This intuitive approach significantly reduces design time.

Designed as a living document, the system adapts to UHC's evolving needs. For example, changes to core elements like colors and fonts can be made within the "Foundations" page, automatically updating them throughout the entire system. This ensures brand consistency and simplifies future maintenance.

Email Creation

Design Conclusions & Client Feedback

Following the final design presentation, I facilitated a comprehensive handover process for the UHC team. This included a step-by-step walkthrough of the Sketch file, addressing any questions and demonstrating optimal workflows for utilizing the design system.

For ongoing support and knowledge transfer, I created a detailed 42-page playbook. This serves as a valuable resource for both new team members and those who were unable to attend the live session.

The client's enthusiastic reception of the design system was evident. They quickly embraced it as their go-to tool for email design, demonstrating the project's success.

Create a design system with a shared set of email modules that:

Empowers efficient email creation
The system serves as a library of pre-approved email modules, eliminating the need for designers to start from scratch. This significantly reduces design time and guesswork, streamlining the entire email production process.
Ensures brand consistency for both business units
Doubling each module and stylizing them per the business unit's specific brand guidelines allowed both brands to live in the same design system while maintaining their unique elements.
Guarantees legal compliance
The design system incorporates modules pre-approved by the legal team, ensuring all emails comply with legal requirements. This streamlines the review process for the legal team and allows email and creative teams to focus on crafting compelling campaign content.

⚡ REVISITING THE DESIGN OBJECTIVE

✏️ PERSONAL TAKEAWAYS

The project's success hinged on iterative client feedback. Regularly presenting design stages allowed for course correction and fostered a collaborative environment. This not only saved valuable time and resources for UHC but also streamlined communication throughout the development process.

This design system proved to be one of the most intricate I've tackled due to the unique needs of both Medicare Advantage and Medicare Supplement units. However, the complexity presented a rewarding opportunity to delve deeper into my design system skills. The resulting system significantly improved UHC's email design efficiency, a testament to the project's impact.