Redesigning ALEX, a tool to help with healthcare and financial decisions

In 2022, I oversaw a refresh of the design for Jellyvision's flagship product: ALEX Benefits Counselor, which helps millions of employees choose their health insurance, save for retirement, and understand their employer benefits. As the creative lead for the product, I worked with a talented team of artists and designers to overhaul the writing, art, sound, and interaction design throughout the experience.

ALEX takes the form of an interactive conversation, where an engaging, approachable host asks you questions and helps you find your best benefits. While an effective tool, its tone was sometimes juvenile, and many of the educational sequences could do a much better job of explaining important but hard-to-follow benefits information. Internally, our team also faced a unique hurdle: legacy proprietary tooling that made it difficult to assess creative work in a real environment.

My role as creative lead was to:

• Help the team design and produce an engaging, helpful experience.
• Find a way to work around, and even embrace, our technical constraints.
• Validate our choices with users and customers.

First, I led a complete audit of all of the creative in the product, organizing team discussions on the moments in the experience needed reworking, and which didn't. We came up with a list of improvements we could make based on our tooling constraints, and negotiated this list with developers to make sure our goals were feasible in a tight deadline.

Then we got to work, poring over the product's dense content and complex logic in all nine of its educational modules. I led reviews of in-progress creative, providing guidance on scripting and media production. I also worked with our research team to run a number of usability tests of in-progress designs. When needed, I even got in the thick of it, producing some of the product's audio-video sequences, and designing internal creative tools so we could more efficiently work in ALEX's proprietary tech stack.

After six months of work, reception to the refresh was unanimously positive. It garnered glowing responses from ALEX's customers, and passed our internal A/B and usability testing metrics — the proof we needed that we produced an ALEX that gives people peace of mind about important benefits decisions.