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Craig Tomlin
New Media Manager
WellPoint |
Taking marketing to a higher level – with usability
by Jesse Berkowitz
WellPoint is a leading health benefits company in the U.S., with approximately 28 million medical members nationwide. WellPoint is a Blue Cross Blue Shield licensee in 13 states, and 1 in 10 Americans receives coverage for their medical care through WellPoint's health plans.
In the early days of the Web (1998), Craig Tomlin was asked to create an online marketing strategy for WellPoint. Like many companies at that time, WellPoint saw the potential of offering their health benefits services via the Internet, but didn't have a clear action plan. Craig realized that WellPoint needed to unify its existing sites before they grew so large that this wasn't practical.
"WellPoint had no online brand strategy, no design standards, and no consistent taxonomy for the Web," says Craig. "We started out with an unknown number of sites which often turned out to be hosted on servers underneath people's desks. Worse, we knew what we wanted to offer online, but not necessarily what our customers wanted. I realized that usability was the missing link in our process."
This made Craig the de facto usability person at WellPoint, and people started looking to him for answers. Craig was serving three different roles at the time – marketing, Internet branding, and usability – but quickly realized that he had a lot to learn about usability. He attended HFI's training courses, obtained his CUA, and read lots of books about user-centered design.
| "You need to do customer research before designing Web sites, but not only in the traditional marketing sense. It's about more than just what to put on your Web site. You have to understand how people actually think and reflect that process in your designs." |
"I learned very early on that you need to do customer research before designing Web sites, but not only in the traditional marketing sense," he says. "It's about more than just what to put on your Web site. You have to understand how people actually think and reflect that process in your designs.
"It's amazing how many Web projects still begin with no user documentation. But more executives are taking usability seriously now. It's fascinating to see how well the usability process really works. You learn to value user expectations over your own preconceptions."
Craig cites a recent example of how usability analysis can uncover problems in the early stages of design – and prevent disasters later on.
"We user tested a prototype of one of our main consumer sites and found a 50% failure rate when people tried to find an insurance agent. We noticed that many of those people were looking under the 'Contact Us' section, but this section didn't mention agents at all. It only required a simple change to account for this user tendency – adding a link to our Agent Finder in the 'Contact Us' section – but it saved us from losing a lot of business down the road. Applying usability principles early in the development cycle often has big ramifications."
The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association sponsors an annual competition in which affiliates from around the country submit their best marketing campaigns. Craig Tomlin's team won the national "Best of Blue" award in the internet/intranet category, out of 182 entries, for their site: www.rightplanppo40.com. Check out more of his online marketing campaigns at: www.wcraigtomlin.com.
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