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Anthem.com redesign critique

I use Anthem for my health insurance. Their old site left a lot to be desired, and I am glad to see attention being paid to the site. However, the new site is just bewilderingly unusable. It *looks* good, but it is unnecessarily complicated, inconsistent, and just “all over the place”. The criticism in this post is motivated by the fact that if I, a web developer, have trouble using their site, imagine the average non web developer user trying to use it. I was also simply incensed at the thought that Anthem probably spent untold millions developing this, when a better design could be developed up in a day or two. I can’t understand how it is possible for such a large health insurance company to get this so completely wrong.

See for yourself (click the image to view it full-size):

Some observations:

• First off, I had to re-register on their site just to use their new site. They apparently did not migrate the old user data to the new site. For a site handling millions of users, I think this is a major no-no.
• When view plan details for a health plan, why on earth are all the various benefits not expanded by default? Why should I as a customer have to click on each one to view the detail. It is a table, and that information should simply be visible by default. Make it a longer page if you must.
• The FIND A DOCTOR and CHECK CLAIM STATUS buttons at the top right do not look like they’re clickable. If you move your cursor over them, you do not get a hand cursor – it remains an arrow.
• Where can I find billing-related information? It is nowhere to be found.
• The Account Summary link at the top left takes up precious space for no good reason. Why not just go with a left column only, and put everything inside that?
• The blue and purple Plans & Benefits and Health & Wellness navigation is not obvious. It’s artsy, and I can appreciate that, but for regular end-users it is not at all obvious.
• There really should be just ONE navigation menu, for clarity. They have FOUR different kinds of navigation. It is not consistent, and this makes it confusing. It’s just “all over the place”.
• In Google Chrome at least, I get an SSL warning about mixed SSL and non-SSL content. You should make sure all your images, CSS files, and JavaScript files are being loaded using SSL (https), not http.

Conclusion

I bet their design process was centered on improving the backend functioning of their site and interaction with their databases as well as electronic health records, and then they crammed in some design at the very end. If they focused on design from the get-go, it wouldn’t look like such a mish-mash. The user experience is key for sites like this, but instead it looks like a committee decided which functions should be included in the user area, and it was left to the designers to merge that all into one (unfortunately incoherent) whole. I think they got the process backwards, their programmers and designers did not communicate well, and/or it was all designed by committee.