Designing the MedImpact member portal for desktop and mobile

A pharmacy plan involves cost, health information, and plan rules at the same time, which makes it easy for members to lose track of what matters to them. The design had to take that complexity and present it in a way that answered the member's immediate question.

Three problems were central to the work.

The same process runs through every project I take on. Learn, define, design, test, refine, then hand off. The loop from refine back to design is the part that matters most: nothing here is a straight line, and the portal took several passes before the screens showed members what they needed at each step.

I worked as a Senior UX Designer through Photon, on a remote contract. I met with the product team every day and worked with product managers, researchers, visual designers, and developers throughout. Part of the role was reviewing work from the development team and other designers.

Each area followed the same process: define the task, design it for desktop and mobile, review it with the team, and revise. Much of the work involved keeping plan logic, eligibility, pricing tiers, and coverage rules, accurate in the background while keeping the interface straightforward.

MedImpact's Drug Price Check competes on the job members care about most: finding out what a prescription will actually cost. Two very different kinds of tools were already doing part of that job, and neither did all of it.

We looked at both fronts:

• GoodRx and SingleCare, the consumer prescription-discount leaders
• Blink Health and RxSaver, other discount-card tools
• CVS Caremark, Express Scripts, and OptumRx, the “Big Three” PBM member portals

That mapped the opening. The discount cards were transparent but disconnected from the plan; the incumbent portals were connected but hard to read. MedImpact could be both, showing real, plan-specific prices across pharmacies before a member fills.

Competitor research told me what the category had settled on. It could not tell me why MedImpact’s own members hesitated or called support. For that I combined a short member survey to size the problem with follow-up conversations to understand it.

Member survey responses from people who had filled a prescription through their plan in the previous few months, plus follow-up conversations and daily input from Photon’s product team, who fielded the questions members were calling in about.

The survey was deliberately short, focused on why members open the portal and where the pharmacy benefit gets confusing, because that is where the support calls clustered.

Two numbers reframed the project. 46% said the hardest part was knowing what a drug would cost before filling, and 42% came to the portal mainly to check a price. Members were not asking for more features. Cost was the reason they showed up, and the portal was making them guess.

The survey said where members struggled. The conversations said why. I kept the questions behavioral, asking what people actually did last time rather than what they think of the product.

Different words, same handful of frustrations, and each one maps to a theme that came out of the affinity map.

The design was informed by the plan tasks themselves and by daily input from Photon's product team, who had visibility into where members had difficulty and what generated support calls. Several patterns were consistent:

• Not knowing a drug's cost in advance was the most common reason members hesitated.
• Information shown without explanation was more likely to prompt a support call than an action.
• Members tended to scan rather than read, so long blocks of plan text were often skipped.
• A significant portion of members used the portal only on mobile.

We gathered notes from member interviews, Photon’s support-call input, and early usability tests, then grouped them to find the patterns.

Members described their frustrations differently, but the underlying themes were consistent. Whether they were talking about cost, refills, or benefits, the same questions kept surfacing.

Once we clustered everything, it became clear: we weren’t just solving for layout. We were solving for a member being able to answer “what will this cost, and what do I do next?”

Before grouping features, I ran a prioritization session with Photon’s product team in Figma. Each participant worked on their own card and answered, for the dashboard, why members open it, what features would make it better, what they think about while using it, and how they feel. We then ranked the features together.

The prioritization matrix and each participant's notes from the live Figma session.

These are the main tasks a member comes to the portal to do. Each flow starts from the dashboard and ends where the task is done, so the whole path is visible in one place.

The redesign is organized around member tasks. Each area of the portal addresses a specific need.

Summary of changes

MedImpact was built for mobile as well as desktop. The app puts the same core tasks, checking a drug price, refilling a prescription, tracking doses, and managing benefits, in a layout made for a phone.

The information architecture of the mobile app, from the primary sections down to their screens.

I ran moderated usability tests with 7 participants to validate the core member tasks. Each session lasted about 25 minutes and followed a structured test guide. I tracked completion rate, error rate, time to success, and satisfaction, then assigned severity ratings (1 = cosmetic, 4 = must fix) to prioritize what needed attention.

Task Results

Key Findings

The handoff files cover the full icon set, color and type styles, and redlined specs for every screen and state, organized so developers can reference components and their variants at a glance.

After the project, the product manager I worked with completed a UX/UI client feedback survey and left a recommendation on my LinkedIn. Here is the full response.