John Zhu

In 2023, I created a set of extensive content, data, and business logic maps for the My Premiums portion of the Medicare.gov user account. That set up my contract team for a successful server migration and a quick visual redesign for the experience. The successful migration produced significant maintenance savings for our client, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The My Premiums section is an important part of the account experience, as Medicare beneficiaries go there to review their premiums and pay their Medicare bills. This section was built on a complex web of interwoven business logic and conditional content. The landing page of the experience, for instance, had only about 150 words but contained at least 25 conditional components, totaling 68 content variations that multiplied into exponentially more combinations. From the landing page, the experience branched out into five major sections, each with its own share of conditional content and business logic. To further complicate matters, some of the content and logic were controlled by our contract team, while others came from external systems and databases outside the team’s control.

In order to perform a successful migration and redesign, the product, engineering, data, and UX teams needed a clear, shared understanding of the content, data sources, and business logic. As the senior content strategist on the contract team, I took the lead on that front. Using an existing spreadsheet and consultations with two in-house subject-matter experts, I developed three Murals that mapped out the My Premiums experience.

The first Mural mapped the content, data sources, and business logic from the spreadsheet onto 30-plus screenshots of the existing experience, creating a much more tangible view of the content, data source, and business logic associated with each element. This process also provided a clearer idea of how many content variations were hidden within each line of text on a particular page. In addition, it uncovered several errors in the existing documentation. Finally, the Mural contained a brief overview and key context to help someone quickly understand the map, which reduced the amount of repetitive onboarding as additional team members joined the work at various stages.

In the second Mural, I mapped out the experience for the primary user scenarios. I studied the business logic and identified the two most variables that had the greatest influence on which content variations were displayed. Tracing those two variables across the experience, I identified three major user scenarios and sketched out the My Premiums flow for each of those scenarios. Each flow included screenshots of the existing experience for each section of My Premiums, annotated with display logic and content specific to that scenario. This helped the UX team understand the scope of its redesign work — how many versions existed for a particular page, how many new designs needed to be developed, etc. It also provided a framework for organizing the new prototypes.

The third Mural mapped the documented content, data sources, and business logic onto the new designs created by the UX team. This made it easier for the engineering team to match up the new designs with the existing experience. This Mural also contained the text of all the content, allowing the engineers to copy directly from it, thsu reducing the amount of text entry and the chance for errors.

Together, the three Murals and the process that produced them yielded numerous benefits that powered the initiative:

• They served as a useful common reference point for UX, product, engineering, and data throughout the migration and redesign.
• They clarified the scope and contour of the work and organized the way in which the UX team would tackle various parts of the experience.
• Through the discovery needed to create these artifacts, I acquired enough knowledge about the My Premiums experience to be able to answer some of the common questions from team members, thus allowing our subject-matter experts to focus on the more complicated questions.
• The detailed artifacts were a useful way to gain trust with our clients by demonstrating our in-depth understanding of the My Premiums experience.