Hundreds of thousands of Americans rely on State-Based Marketplaces to enroll in healthcare — often during stressful life moments. The platform powering Washington DC, Maine, and Massachusetts’ Healthcare Marketplace was failing them: confusing navigation, no mobile support (despite a significant portion of users having only phone access), outdated UI patterns, and federal accessibility violations that made it unusable for people with disabilities.
A complete redesign of the enrollment experience — rebuilt mobile-first, brought into full WCAG AA / 508 compliance, and anchored by a new design system that ensures every future feature ships consistently and accessibly. The goal wasn’t a visual refresh; it was making healthcare enrollment actually work for the people who need it most.
Enroll App powers the health insurance marketplaces for Washington DC (Individual, SHOP, and Congress markets), Maine (Individual Market), and Massachusetts (SHOP Market) — real platforms serving real constituents, where design changes require careful coordination across state agencies, policy requirements, and engineering cycles.
Unlike typical product companies, UX investment in Enroll App is not funded through a central product budget. Improvements are instead scoped and funded through individual work orders requested by each state client — meaning design enhancements only happen when a client’s need creates an opening for them. Working within this model, I’ve learned to identify opportunities within incoming work orders to advocate for and slip in UX improvements that wouldn’t otherwise get prioritized. A bug fix becomes a chance to standardize a broken pattern. A policy-driven content update becomes an opportunity to restructure a confusing flow. It’s incremental by necessity, but intentional by design.
This constraint has made me a sharper, more persuasive designer — one who understands that good UX often has to be sold internally before it can be built.
I led all design activities on this project end-to-end — from initial audit through ongoing maintenance — embedded within an engineering-focused team at IdeaCrew.
I began by conducting a comprehensive experience audit of the existing platform, cataloging accessibility violations, information architecture inconsistencies, and usability breakdowns across the application. From there, I gathered and synthesized user data — demographics, device analytics, call center feedback, and support ticket logs — to build personas, user stories, and journey maps that grounded every subsequent design decision in real user behavior.
With that foundation in place, I designed and built a new design system in Figma from the ground up, architected for WCAG AA / Section 508 compliance from day one, so that anything built on top of it would inherit accessibility by default rather than as an afterthought. The system established consistent patterns for typography, color, components, and interaction across both mobile and desktop.
From the design system, I produced high-fidelity wireframes and interactive prototypes covering the full enrollment experience — new user flows, updated information architecture, and modernized UI patterns — presenting and negotiating design decisions with product owners and stakeholders throughout. The work continues as an ongoing engagement, evolving alongside new healthcare legislation and product requirements.
My process adapts to each project, but typically follows these four phases — grounded in the NN Group research framework.
Demographic data informed every design decision, while being treated as generalizations rather than absolutes — age affects technology comfort, location affects care/medication needs, income level determines financial assistance eligibility, family size affects enrollment complexity, citizenship status changes the user flow entirely, and language barriers can prevent access altogether.
The redesign established a scalable design system with full WCAG AA / 508 compliance — opening enrollment to users who previously couldn’t complete it due to disability — and modernized the platform’s entire UI foundation through a $1M+ Bootstrap 3 → 5 migration. Rather than a one-time overhaul, the design system continues to evolve alongside new features, policy changes, and client-specific requirements across all three markets it powers.
The redesigned experience is currently live in Maine’s Individual Market, with a full unbranded reference implementation available for the other markets. DC’s migration is planned for 2026-2027 — its largest deployment yet — and will bring the same accessibility and consistency foundation to the platform’s biggest user base.
Explore the redesigned New Employer enrollment flow in the interactive figma prototypes below.