Power to Decide: BCBenefits
Scope
New Product | New Service | Interaction Design Strategy
Opportunity
Power to Decide contracted Citizen Tech Collective to create a digital tool, ‘BCBenefits’, that would connect low income users to easy and affordable access to birth control. The aim of ‘BCBenefits’ is to eliminate all barriers to accessing affordable birth control such as appointment costs, birth control costs, transportation, child care, and lost wages reimbursement.
Project Impact
2,295 benefits have been awarded through ‘BCBenefits’ in the year since launch (as of April 2020)
‘BCBenefits’ is available in every US state
Current Available Benefits:
Telemedicine appointment
Transportation reimbursement
Contraceptive visit and method reimbursement
‘BCBenefits’ is a digital tool that is aimed at eliminating all the barriers to accessing birth control for people whose HHI is 250% below the poverty line. Citizen Tech Collective and Power to Decide created and launched the MVP and initial iterations of ‘BCBenefits’ which verifies a user’s income and location to provide them with all the benefits that are available to them. In its final iteration, through generous donors and partners, the program will cover or reimburse the cost of the prescription, transportation to the appointment, appointment cost, child care, and lost wages for users.
My Role: UX Research Lead, QA
Team: Power to Decide: Jennifer Johnsen (VP Digital Programs & Education), Allison McGrath (Marketing & Behavioral Insights Manager); Citizen Tech Collective: Chelsey Delaney (UX Lead), Tara Hosseinipour (UX Designer), Gillian (Project Manager), Jeff Aldrich (Development & Product Manager), Hannah Pyper (Partner & Content Manager)
project highlights
User Research and Analysis
The audience for BCBenefits is both very specific in terms of economic status and very distinct in terms of location. Since most of the benefits and the ways to access those benefits vary state to state it was critical to do remote user testing with participants who were representative in terms of location and ethnicity, and who had a qualifying household income relative to their household size.
Content and Communication Strategy
Navigating the complex world of insurance, Medicaid, and no insurance is incredibly difficult especially when it comes to understanding how to qualify for and access benefits. BCBenefits is available to both users who are uninsured and insured, the more important qualifier is average household income. The digital tool utilized direct, plain, and user-tested language to explain the path to qualification, and the options and offerings clearly.
Compliance + Verification
A vital part of BCBenefits success is complying with state laws and verifying that the user qualifies for the program. In order to ensure that the benefits go to the users who need them, BCBenefits needs to ask for personal information such as household income and size, as well as supporting documentation. We worked closely with Power to Decide in order to determine which forms documentation would be easiest for our users to provide. We then user tested our upload methods and our instructions around income verification to ensure users felt safe and secure providing BCBenefits with their personal information.
Partners and Donors
One of the challenges that the team faced was setting up the user journey that happened outside of the BCBenefits tool. This meant working closely with our benefit partners to ensure that the path to redeeming the awarded benefit or receiving reimbursement is clear and easy. Whenever possible the flows that involved physical-world interaction were tested by our team.
