Helping patients navigate thousands of insurance optionsInsurance picker improvements
Project overview
Insurance selection is a required part of booking on Zocdoc, but roughly 20% of patients left without successfully adding their insurance.
I joined the work after an earlier redesign had already failed to improve the experience. Over the next two iterations, I redesigned the picker to better support patients who didn’t always know exactly what answer the system expected from them.
Date
2021-2022
Role
Senior Product Designer
Team
Product, Engineering, Research, Analytics, Product Marketing, Brand, Design Systems
Scope
Desktop/ mobile web
Learning from an earlier launch
Before I joined, the team had already tested V3 against the existing picker. It did not improve overall conversion, and the plan step remained a major source of friction.
In the existing experience, patients had to navigate a taxonomy of roughly 855 carriers and 18,000+ plans, often without knowing the exact plan name Zocdoc expected.
V3 emphasized popular options and search while making the full lists less prominent. Some carrier-selection behavior improved, but 48% of patients who searched for a plan returned to the full list and ~32% dropped after searching.
v4: Rethinking how patients find their insurance
V3 increased engagement with popular carriers, but patients still struggled to find less-common insurance and move from carrier to the right plan. For v4, I redesigned the picker to make those paths more explicit—improving autocomplete, expanding popular options, restoring easier access to the full lists, and clarifying the carrier → plan progression.
v4: Desktop
On desktop, the picker still opened as an inline/dropdown experience. I kept the full lists accessible, and added “I can’t find my plan” as a clear fallback for patients who couldn’t identify their exact plan.
The complete flow connected carrier selection to plan selection while preserving search, browsing, and fallback paths when patients couldn’t find the exact answer.
v4: Mobile web
On Mobile Web, I adapted the same strategy into a more immersive, full-screen flow, with search, popular options, full-list access, and the carrier → plan progression clearly separated.
Feature: “I can’t find my plan”
V4 introduced “I can’t find my plan” for patients who knew their carrier but couldn’t confidently identify the exact plan.
For the MVP, this was primarily a test of intent. Selecting the fallback let patients continue with partially added insurance using the carrier’s default plan for search, rather than forcing them to choose a plan they didn’t recognize. and effectively is a SKIP option
Changes mirrored mobile, expanding top carriers and exposing lists for user discovery The desktop insurance picker was an in-line search experience that needed to be mapped and accounted for across pages throughout the user journey, Home and search pages.
V3 → V4: I exposed search, de-emphasized the insurance-card scan, and brought the full carrier list back into view—giving patients clearer paths to recognize, search for, or browse their insurance.
The v4 experiment validated the new model
V4 increased overall booking conversion +1.4%, with a larger +3.2% lift for first-time patients and roughly 1,900 projected additional bookings per month.
Autocomplete usage also increased, and 5–8% of patients used the new “I can’t find my plan” path.
The complete V4 flow connected carrier and plan selection while preserving search, browsing, and fallback paths throughout.
v5: Making the primary paths easier
V5 focused on helping more patients find their insurance before they needed the fallback. We made the main search path more prominent, expanded the options patients could find, and moved “I can’t find my plan” into a secondary position after it had been validated in V4.
V5 expanded popular options and autocomplete results to up to 8, giving patients more chances to find the right carrier before opening the full list.
On desktop, I moved the picker into an immersive modal so search had more space and focus. We also expanded popular options and autocomplete results.
We changed behavior, but not conversion
Overall booking conversion was roughly flat, but behavior shifted in the intended direction: +2.3% insurance searches, +26.7% popular-carrier selection, −41.5% long-list carrier selection, and −2.1% use of “I can’t find my plan.”
V5 made search and relevant options easier to find while reducing reliance on long lists and fallback paths.
The progression of the mobile web insurance picker