Providing Cigna clients with real time COVID information
As Senior Product Designer, I defined the strategy for the COVID Analytics Suite, designing a unified dashboard that consolidated fragmented tools and surfaced actionable insights, empowering client managers to make faster, data-driven decisions.
Company
Cigna
American Health-Insurance Company
My Role
Senior Product Designer
Duration
8 Weeks
The Problem
COVID-19 data and analytics are critical to helping employers make informed decisions about workforce safety, cost, and care, but the existing tools at Cigna were fragmented, difficult to synthesize, and not designed around the real questions client managers needed to answer.
In practice, this meant the experience functioned more like a collection of disconnected reports than a cohesive decision-making system—limiting the ability to identify risk, guide return-to-work strategies, and proactively respond to emerging trends.
How I Contributed
As Lead Product Designer, I worked hands-on across research, strategy, and execution for the COVID Analytics Suite, while coordinating a multi-designer team and aligning stakeholders across product, data, and business.
- Facilitated workshops, led research, and synthesized insights
- Defined information architecture and navigation framework
- Designed end-to-end UX, wireframes, dashboards, and data visualization patterns
- Led execution and guided a 3-designer team
- Leveraged storytelling for alignment and buy-in
Who I worked With
Design
4 Product Designers
Product
2 Product Managers
Software Development
5+ Engineers
Data Science
5+ Engineers
My Approach
SME Workshops
Facilitated workshops to gather domain expertise and align on key user and business needs.
Product Audit
Evaluated existing analytics tools to understand capabilities, limitations, and fragmentation across the ecosystem.
Usage Data
Analyzed product usage data and existing systems to identify patterns, friction points, and consolidation opportunities.
Secondary Research
Reviewed public health reporting standards and clinical frameworks to inform interpretation and structure of data.
Competitive Benchmarking
Evaluated comparable healthcare and analytics platforms to inform UX and visualization direction.
This work gave us a clear understanding of how COVID-related data was currently distributed across Cigna’s tools, where fragmentation was limiting decision-making, and what opportunities existed to unify insights into a single, cohesive experience. It also surfaced key needs from stakeholders around risk visibility, trend comparison, and population health insights, alongside how similar healthcare analytics platforms structured and presented complex data.
This foundation allowed us to move confidently into the design phase and begin shaping early concepts for a unified COVID analytics dashboard.
What we learned
As we moved through research and concept testing, a few clear patterns emerged. These insights directly informed the direction of the experience.
COVID data was highly fragmented across tools
Key signals around risk, trends, and population health were spread across multiple systems, making it difficult to form a single, reliable view.
Users needed synthesis, not raw data
Client managers weren’t looking to interpret raw datasets. They needed consolidated insights that answered specific business and health questions.
Decision-making depended on comparison over time
The ability to compare current COVID trends against historical baselines was critical for understanding impact and guiding reopening decisions.
Risk interpretation lacked a unified lens
Different tools presented related metrics in isolation, making it difficult to understand overall risk at a population or regional level.
Stakeholders needed a narrative, not just dashboards
Client-facing teams were often responsible for translating data into guidance, but lacked a clear, structured way to communicate the “story” in the data.
Turning Insights into Solutions
Each solution was designed to address key user needs and translate findings into more intentional product decisions.
Insights → Innovation
COVID insights were scattered across multiple systems
Designed a unified analytics dashboard that consolidated key signals into a single, cohesive experience
Users were forced to navigate multiple systems to understand risk and impact. We brought these signals together into one place so insights could be understood without switching contexts.
Insights → Innovation
Users needed interpretation and clarity, not exposure to raw data
Designed a question-led experience that translated complex datasets into focused, actionable insights
Rather than presenting raw data for users to interpret, we structured the experience around key questions they were trying to answer, reducing cognitive load and speeding up decision-making.
Insights → Innovation
Decision-making relied heavily on comparing trends over time
Built comparative visualizations that enabled side-by-side analysis of historical and pandemic-era trends
We introduced time-based comparisons so users could quickly understand how COVID was impacting metrics relative to prior baselines and expectations.
Insights → Innovation
Risk signals were inconsistent and hard to interpret across tools
Created a unified population health view that standardized how risk and trends were surfaced
Different systems surfaced related metrics in different ways, making interpretation difficult. We consolidated these into a consistent model for clearer understanding at a population level.
Insights → Innovation
Insights needed to support communication, not just analysis
Designed narrative-driven dashboard flows and aligned prototype outputs with client storytelling needs
Client-facing teams needed to translate insights into clear narratives. We shaped the experience to support that storytelling layer and partnered with production to bring it into prototype and video assets.
The Impact
While this work was delivered under tight timelines and evolving conditions, it helped consolidate fragmented COVID analytics into a unified experience that better supported client decision-making. It also created a shared direction for how Cigna could structure and communicate population health insights at scale.
Impact & Adoption
78% of clients implemented new health or workplace policies based on insights from the dashboard, demonstrating strong real-world applicability of the experience.
Product Consolidation
Delivered a unified COVID Analytics Suite by bringing together multiple tools into a single experience, supporting client managers in exploring trends and acting on population health data more efficiently.
Speed & Effecincy
Enabled faster interpretation of risk signals and trends, helping client managers reduce time to recommendation for workplace policies and interventions.