Innovating Healthy Shopping

Problem: Making healthy choices is hard and Anthem members do not have the resources they need that encourage and promote living a healthy lifestyle and making better food choices everyday.

Product: Anthem Well-being Tools (Big Idea Pitch)
My Role: Big Ideas & Strategy, Product Design & Prototyping
Duration: 6 Months

Approach

Role & Responsibilities

I partnered with a team of Researchers and Service Designers to innovate well-being and create a vision for healthy living resources. This initiative took shape over the course of 6 months and I collaborated with a large number of stakeholders along the way.

Our core task was to pitch a vision to Consumer Experience in order to receive funding to green light additional investment.

My key contributions were around identifying Big Ideas that could solve our pain points, as well as all artifact design, storyboarding, product design and prototyping. I also lead and participated in multiple design sprints and workshops.

Identified Pain Points

At the beginning, we aligned on a few key pain points, leveraged from previous research and insight from customers. These were used to guide our approach and frame the problem we wanted to pursue, creating a boundary for our ideas.

The Ask

How might Anthem provide tools that meet consumers where they are and help them make healthy choices?

Goal 1

Help people make healthy shopping choices in a way that adds little effort to their current routine.
Goal 2

Leverage the expertise of both Anthem and grocery chains to add value to the shopping experience.
Goal 3

Offer incentives for people when they make healthy choices in accordance with their needs.

Our Process and How We Worked

Design sprints & workshops

We utilized the Google Design Sprint method and hosted many sprints that included stakeholders, subject matter experts and designers. We also partnered with IBM and hosted tailored workshops to identify key big ideas that would add value to our customer’s needs.

Prototypes that were “just right”

We wanted our prototypes to serve as a tool to answer questions, but be open for iteration. Additionally, we focused on getting concepts that were just enough fidelity to keep our conversations moving forward. Some technical details were simplified so we wouldn’t get caught up in early limitations.

Design Sprint & Workshop

Some highlights from our design sprint and workshop.

Key Ideas

After working through persona mapping exercises, “doing, thinking and feeling” empathy activities and impact vs feasibility analysis, we had a few key ideas we could move forward.

It’s about convenience, usefulness and enjoyment.

Automated & Endorsed Food Plans
Smart Grocery for Guided Shopping
Rewards & Encouragement
Track Impact

Guided Healthy Shopping Choices

A guided and personalized in-store grocery shopping experience, recommending food options, while helping you earn rewards along the way.

Scenario

After work, Olivia heads to her nearest grocery to do some shopping. While in the store, she receives location-based notifications for personalized, healthy food options for her and her family. She makes her selections and checks out.

Smart Grocery Scenario

Final Prototype

Our “just right” concept used to pitch a vision for how Anthem tools can address our member needs for healthy choices.

View Prototype

Identified Areas of High Value

We realized early on that in order to provide meaningful and tailored recommendations we would need to connect to many sources of input such as medical info and individualized health spectrum assessments. We also identified that having household profiles that, for a typical household, one person may need to coordinate the shopping for others in the home. Finally, the ability to utilize many different grocery chains, across locations was a high value inclusion.

Key Features

Location and profile based healthy food recommendations
Multiple health source integrations
Medical care team endorsements based on individual health assessments
In-store alerts & signage
Reward points and cost savings

Location based alerts from “Smart Grocery”

Care team, endorsed food and rewards

Keep track of purchases and rewards based on choices

Early feedback = iterations

During our initial testing, we had a mixed input of feedback. While the idea of health specific guidance and assistance was well received, the level of interaction in the moment may prove to be too much of a barrier. Similarly, the level of medical data shared between providers and grocery chains prompted questions around trust and might be a barrier for use as well.

Conclusion

What we learned

While shopping, users may not want this level of attachment to their mobile devices. Additionally, integrating all of the available sources may be a barrier to provide meaningful recommendations and insights to customers.

Process Improvements

Our timeline was extremely rushed and we noticed that we could have used more stakeholder involvement earlier in the process. We also realized the need for more testing of the idea and a more clear definition of “done”.

Funded and Partnership Match

This initiative proved to be a success and was funded and matched with the 3rd largest grocery chain in the United States as a strategic partner to continue discovery on this effort.

Update Jan 2022: Core tenants of this work still shows through today with Anthem partnerships and resources around healthy shopping for food.