8 ms·

Simple Design is What You Need, Not What You Want

73 points by promocha 12y ago

coldcode 12y ago
Deliver what people need, not what they ask for. Same concept.
droob 12y ago
I guess they didn't just want the 18 trackers Ghostery found on that post, they needed them?
freshyill 12y ago
Health insurance bill is a great example. But an even better example is the garbage that I get from my insurance provider a week or so after any member of my family visits a doctor. It usually has on it somewhere… THIS IS NOT A BILL Then what is it? What it is is a piece of paper filled with meaningless jargon, and now I have to figure out what to do with it. Stop wasting paper, time and money unless I need to do something. If it's something I might conceivably need someday to prove I was there, then let me just go on your damn site and download a PDF when that hypothetical day comes.
- mattgreenrocks 12y ago
  I wonder about these too. Let's assume that all carriers are cheapskates, yet they send them. Perhaps they're meant to convey to the customer, "look at how much we're saving you!" while simultaneously maintaining the illusion that Health Care is Very Expensive?
  - twistedpair 12y ago
    Junk mail keeps the USPS alive. Really.
    - mattgreenrocks 12y ago
      I don't think it's junk mail, per se. Real junk mail, AFAIK, requires the senders to pay USPS money to send. Why would insurance companies (who are cost-sensitive, or so they want us to believe) pay to send useless mail that doesn't generate any additional revenue?
      - weaksauce 12y ago
        Regulation is the likely answer.
      - dragonwriter 12y ago
        > Why would insurance companies (who are cost-sensitive, or so they want us to believe) pay to send useless mail that doesn't generate any additional revenue? Because it reduces costs and risks. First, because I believe that in most cases where the insurance company is billed it is legally required, so there are noncompliance costs, but also because customers sometimes do need them (perhaps less often now, but in multiple coverage situations it used to at least occasionally happen that the beneficiary would have to do coordination of benefits between primary and secondary insurer rather than providers or insurers handling that, and you can send a lot of no-decision-involved mail for the cost of dealing with occasional request plus dealing with on-demand mail.
- melvinmt 12y ago
  It's a receipt.
- JumpCrisscross 12y ago
  It's a disclosure. It may or not be legally required. It would, nonetheless, be advised by their counsel as a way of mitigating liability with billing errors, etc.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > THIS IS NOT A BILL > Then what is it? Most likely an Explanation of Benefits. http://healthinsurance.about.com/od/healthinsurancebasics/a/understanding_EOB.htm http://healthinsurance.about.com/od/healthinsurancebasics/a/...
jrochkind1 12y ago
> While its core offering is basic — it collects money from members and pays for their care when they need it... Right, so you just described the concept of 'health insurance', any/all health insurance. Which is not necessarily 'basic' at all in practice. What was the author trying to say here exactly?
- zo1 12y ago
  Shouldn't we take care to draw a distinction between healthcare and health insurance. It seems these days that a lot of people are confused about the distinction. And it tends to somewhat vary from country to country. Note, I live in South Africa, not the US. Personally, I'd love a comeback of proper health insurance. I.e. where day-to-day healthcare costs are not covered, but only the major items that would really put dents in your wallet. Currently I pay quite a bit for a combination of the two, while I'm convinced that if the two were separated then my costs, as a healthy young adult, would be quite a fair bit lower. Correct me if I'm using the wrong terms/definitions
  - walshemj 12y ago
    That's the point the cost is spread over all the population so that if you do get a health condition later in life it's not just you paying for it. For example just one of my meds for my condition costs nearly £200 for a bottle of 180. It also stops discrimination against those with unlucky genes.
  - jrochkind1 12y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean. In the U.S., most people have health insurance that pays for day to day healthcare costs too. Or at least some of them, when they don't refuse to. "healthcare" just means, well, health services. "health insurance" means a program that collects premiums, and then pays out for certain healthcare costs. Maybe in many countries the health insurance market doesn't generally include policies that pay for regular healthcare costs? If there is even a health insurance market at all? Because the government pays for regular (or all?) health care costs, I guess? The U.S. may be the only developed country without nationalized healthcare. In the U.S., health insurance pays for that stuff. At least in theory, if you're lucky enough to have it, and they don't try to weasel out of paying for it, which they do. But it's not about whether the definition of "health insurance" is that or not. It's "health insurance" if you pay a premium to an insurer, and they do underwriting to decide what that premium should be, and then they pay out for qualifying costs under the policy. If qualifying costs include day-to-day healthcare or not, it depends on the policy, but it's health insurance either way, because that's what 'insurance' means. But I agree with you that a health insurance policy paying for regular expected healthcare costs is weird and different than most insurance markets in a way that makes underwriting weird. It's still the insurance market we've got for health insurance in the US.
aresant 12y ago
From a conversion rate optimization perspective you guys should double-down on your "keep it simple" mantra. The homepage is gorgeous, and it looks exactly like what I WANT. However, in my experience with CRO it's not exactly what you NEED. There are nearly 40 mouse-over or clickable actions. There is a cornucopia of colors, images, and even animations. The major "above-the-fold" call to action "See how we're different" is capitalized (harder to read) and doesn't look like a traditionally clickable element to the average person (underlined to indicate link / button like / etc). I would propose that you test something dramatically simpler: check out Optimizely.com today. I've watched www.Optimizely.com evolve with interest over the past few years. They continue to strip away superfluous information from their fundamental action of "see the benefit" in motion. Their site used to look much more like what you have today - have a look at last October: https://web.archive.org/web/20131024222550/https://www.optimizely.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20131024222550/https://www.optim... I have adapted their "CHOP IT" strategy to several clients with ~2/3 responding in a positive CRO direction. It strikes me that you could fit your headline in along with your primary call to action / benefit and probably close more biz.
linghan 12y ago
It's great that the Oscar team is doing this - they seem like smart, dedicated guys. That said, they've chosen a very difficult market, and it's hard to see how they can build a profitable business around this: 1) The Affordable Care Act caps the profits of insurance companies through the imposition of the Medical Loss Ratio (see https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/medical-loss-ratio-MLR/ https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/medical-loss-ratio-MLR/). Insurance companies literally have to pay back excess profits to policyholders. 2) The ACA also eliminates medical underwriting (discriminating based on prior medical history) and imposes guaranteed issue (requiring insurers to accept all applicants), making it impossible to gain competitive advantage by cherry-picking which customers to insure (like GEICO does in auto insurance). The net effect is that insurance companies have basically become utilities. All that's left is to go for scale and efficiency, but this is a heavily regulated, very fragmented space and that greatly constrains how fast you can grow. All that said I commend these folks for doing this - definitely a step in a right direction in an industry that could use it.
zo1 12y ago
Sorry if this post is long for people. As someone running NoScript to enable/disable Javascript per domain. I had to grant about a dozen different domains the ability to run javascript in order to view this page as the authors meant it. Here is a list of those domains: Scratch that, I just counted and it's not a dozen. It's 21 different domains! firstround.com adroll.com disquscdn.com googleapis.com manetate.net mxpnl.com addthis.com tynt.com disqus.com cloudfront.net wistia.com fonts.com facebook.com gstatic.com linkedin.com s3.amazonaws.com gaug.es umanoapp.com twitter.com typekit.com google-analytics.com This is the sort of thing I see on what I like to call ad-mill websites. Pretty much the seedy tabloids of the internet, and it's unfortunate that their message will probably not reach people that aren't willing to enable javascript willy-nilly for every domain this site decided it needs.
- theandrewbailey 12y ago
  If it's that laden with stuff, I'm not going to view the page as the authors meant it. I only have googleapis and linkedin allowed, and the article content is perfectly readable. When you use NoScript, this is what you implicitly signed up for. It's assumed that you know what you're doing.
- sukuriant 12y ago
  Did you just turn on NoScript? Usually, when someone turns on NoScript for the first time, they need to go about enabling and disabling a standard set of websites' use of JS. I wish there were automatic whitelists for this sort of thing, but I haven't seen any yet. While not all, many of those are actually useful for presenting the content. Probably 9 are required to view the page properly and allow for the website to manage their website. The others are common social media you would want, and only like 6 are purely for the ads.
- J_Darnley 12y ago
  You don't have to view a web page as the author intended. I also use NoScript and the text looks like it is all there and I even block all third-party requests using RequestPolicy (I don't see any of their images). The pages that use javascript just to turn off a "display: none" are the really offensive ones.
radley 12y ago
Is this a joke? As a designer I looked at two things: their landing page banner and their revamped bill design. Both are terrible. The banner is large bloated text crushed together, muddled by poor color contrast, offering no reward for making the effort to decipher it. The bill is worse. The "bad" example is exaggerated by fluff (adjustment lines & benefactors) but at least makes a case for what's due when and why. The "good" bill comes off like a phishing scam: you owe us so pay us, in headline print size, without explanation or context. Bad juju.
- sir-pineocone 12y ago
  I believe the fine details of the "good" bill are on the reverse side. Seems to be following one of the article's main points which is to hide the details until you want them.
twic 12y ago
By the time prospective customers have filled out this information, Oscar can present them with personalized recommendations rather than a page jam-packed with options that have nothing to do with the user. Oscar even opted to present one potential insurance package at a time to keep people focused and make sure they don’t get overwhelmed This sounds like a site i would run screaming from. Machines are at their best when they help us to think, not when they try to think for us, and it drives me up the wall when a website has information i am interested in and just won't show it to me. Please tell me there is at least an obvious link that just takes you straight to a table of all the plans? Oh, no there isn't.

73 points by promocha 12y ago

coldcode 12y ago

Deliver what people need, not what they ask for. Same concept.

droob 12y ago

I guess they didn't just want the 18 trackers Ghostery found on that post, they needed them?

freshyill 12y ago

Health insurance bill is a great example. But an even better example is the garbage that I get from my insurance provider a week or so after any member of my family visits a doctor. It usually has on it somewhere… THIS IS NOT A BILL Then what is it? What it is is a piece of paper filled with meaningless jargon, and now I have to figure out what to do with it. Stop wasting paper, time and money unless I need to do something. If it's something I might conceivably need someday to prove I was there, then let me just go on your damn site and download a PDF when that hypothetical day comes.

mattgreenrocks 12y ago
I wonder about these too. Let's assume that all carriers are cheapskates, yet they send them. Perhaps they're meant to convey to the customer, "look at how much we're saving you!" while simultaneously maintaining the illusion that Health Care is Very Expensive?
- twistedpair 12y ago
  Junk mail keeps the USPS alive. Really.
  - mattgreenrocks 12y ago
    I don't think it's junk mail, per se. Real junk mail, AFAIK, requires the senders to pay USPS money to send. Why would insurance companies (who are cost-sensitive, or so they want us to believe) pay to send useless mail that doesn't generate any additional revenue?
    - weaksauce 12y ago
      Regulation is the likely answer.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > Why would insurance companies (who are cost-sensitive, or so they want us to believe) pay to send useless mail that doesn't generate any additional revenue? Because it reduces costs and risks. First, because I believe that in most cases where the insurance company is billed it is legally required, so there are noncompliance costs, but also because customers sometimes do need them (perhaps less often now, but in multiple coverage situations it used to at least occasionally happen that the beneficiary would have to do coordination of benefits between primary and secondary insurer rather than providers or insurers handling that, and you can send a lot of no-decision-involved mail for the cost of dealing with occasional request plus dealing with on-demand mail.
melvinmt 12y ago
It's a receipt.
JumpCrisscross 12y ago
It's a disclosure. It may or not be legally required. It would, nonetheless, be advised by their counsel as a way of mitigating liability with billing errors, etc.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> THIS IS NOT A BILL > Then what is it? Most likely an Explanation of Benefits. http://healthinsurance.about.com/od/healthinsurancebasics/a/understanding_EOB.htm http://healthinsurance.about.com/od/healthinsurancebasics/a/...

jrochkind1 12y ago

> While its core offering is basic — it collects money from members and pays for their care when they need it... Right, so you just described the concept of 'health insurance', any/all health insurance. Which is not necessarily 'basic' at all in practice. What was the author trying to say here exactly?

zo1 12y ago
Shouldn't we take care to draw a distinction between healthcare and health insurance. It seems these days that a lot of people are confused about the distinction. And it tends to somewhat vary from country to country. Note, I live in South Africa, not the US. Personally, I'd love a comeback of proper health insurance. I.e. where day-to-day healthcare costs are not covered, but only the major items that would really put dents in your wallet. Currently I pay quite a bit for a combination of the two, while I'm convinced that if the two were separated then my costs, as a healthy young adult, would be quite a fair bit lower. Correct me if I'm using the wrong terms/definitions
- walshemj 12y ago
  That's the point the cost is spread over all the population so that if you do get a health condition later in life it's not just you paying for it. For example just one of my meds for my condition costs nearly £200 for a bottle of 180. It also stops discrimination against those with unlucky genes.
- jrochkind1 12y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean. In the U.S., most people have health insurance that pays for day to day healthcare costs too. Or at least some of them, when they don't refuse to. "healthcare" just means, well, health services. "health insurance" means a program that collects premiums, and then pays out for certain healthcare costs. Maybe in many countries the health insurance market doesn't generally include policies that pay for regular healthcare costs? If there is even a health insurance market at all? Because the government pays for regular (or all?) health care costs, I guess? The U.S. may be the only developed country without nationalized healthcare. In the U.S., health insurance pays for that stuff. At least in theory, if you're lucky enough to have it, and they don't try to weasel out of paying for it, which they do. But it's not about whether the definition of "health insurance" is that or not. It's "health insurance" if you pay a premium to an insurer, and they do underwriting to decide what that premium should be, and then they pay out for qualifying costs under the policy. If qualifying costs include day-to-day healthcare or not, it depends on the policy, but it's health insurance either way, because that's what 'insurance' means. But I agree with you that a health insurance policy paying for regular expected healthcare costs is weird and different than most insurance markets in a way that makes underwriting weird. It's still the insurance market we've got for health insurance in the US.

aresant 12y ago

From a conversion rate optimization perspective you guys should double-down on your "keep it simple" mantra. The homepage is gorgeous, and it looks exactly like what I WANT. However, in my experience with CRO it's not exactly what you NEED. There are nearly 40 mouse-over or clickable actions. There is a cornucopia of colors, images, and even animations. The major "above-the-fold" call to action "See how we're different" is capitalized (harder to read) and doesn't look like a traditionally clickable element to the average person (underlined to indicate link / button like / etc). I would propose that you test something dramatically simpler: check out Optimizely.com today. I've watched www.Optimizely.com evolve with interest over the past few years. They continue to strip away superfluous information from their fundamental action of "see the benefit" in motion. Their site used to look much more like what you have today - have a look at last October: https://web.archive.org/web/20131024222550/https://www.optimizely.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20131024222550/https://www.optim... I have adapted their "CHOP IT" strategy to several clients with ~2/3 responding in a positive CRO direction. It strikes me that you could fit your headline in along with your primary call to action / benefit and probably close more biz.

linghan 12y ago

It's great that the Oscar team is doing this - they seem like smart, dedicated guys. That said, they've chosen a very difficult market, and it's hard to see how they can build a profitable business around this: 1) The Affordable Care Act caps the profits of insurance companies through the imposition of the Medical Loss Ratio (see https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/medical-loss-ratio-MLR/ https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/medical-loss-ratio-MLR/). Insurance companies literally have to pay back excess profits to policyholders. 2) The ACA also eliminates medical underwriting (discriminating based on prior medical history) and imposes guaranteed issue (requiring insurers to accept all applicants), making it impossible to gain competitive advantage by cherry-picking which customers to insure (like GEICO does in auto insurance). The net effect is that insurance companies have basically become utilities. All that's left is to go for scale and efficiency, but this is a heavily regulated, very fragmented space and that greatly constrains how fast you can grow. All that said I commend these folks for doing this - definitely a step in a right direction in an industry that could use it.

zo1 12y ago

Sorry if this post is long for people. As someone running NoScript to enable/disable Javascript per domain. I had to grant about a dozen different domains the ability to run javascript in order to view this page as the authors meant it. Here is a list of those domains: Scratch that, I just counted and it's not a dozen. It's 21 different domains! firstround.com adroll.com disquscdn.com googleapis.com manetate.net mxpnl.com addthis.com tynt.com disqus.com cloudfront.net wistia.com fonts.com facebook.com gstatic.com linkedin.com s3.amazonaws.com gaug.es umanoapp.com twitter.com typekit.com google-analytics.com This is the sort of thing I see on what I like to call ad-mill websites. Pretty much the seedy tabloids of the internet, and it's unfortunate that their message will probably not reach people that aren't willing to enable javascript willy-nilly for every domain this site decided it needs.

theandrewbailey 12y ago
If it's that laden with stuff, I'm not going to view the page as the authors meant it. I only have googleapis and linkedin allowed, and the article content is perfectly readable. When you use NoScript, this is what you implicitly signed up for. It's assumed that you know what you're doing.
sukuriant 12y ago
Did you just turn on NoScript? Usually, when someone turns on NoScript for the first time, they need to go about enabling and disabling a standard set of websites' use of JS. I wish there were automatic whitelists for this sort of thing, but I haven't seen any yet. While not all, many of those are actually useful for presenting the content. Probably 9 are required to view the page properly and allow for the website to manage their website. The others are common social media you would want, and only like 6 are purely for the ads.
J_Darnley 12y ago
You don't have to view a web page as the author intended. I also use NoScript and the text looks like it is all there and I even block all third-party requests using RequestPolicy (I don't see any of their images). The pages that use javascript just to turn off a "display: none" are the really offensive ones.

radley 12y ago

Is this a joke? As a designer I looked at two things: their landing page banner and their revamped bill design. Both are terrible. The banner is large bloated text crushed together, muddled by poor color contrast, offering no reward for making the effort to decipher it. The bill is worse. The "bad" example is exaggerated by fluff (adjustment lines & benefactors) but at least makes a case for what's due when and why. The "good" bill comes off like a phishing scam: you owe us so pay us, in headline print size, without explanation or context. Bad juju.

sir-pineocone 12y ago
I believe the fine details of the "good" bill are on the reverse side. Seems to be following one of the article's main points which is to hide the details until you want them.

twic 12y ago

By the time prospective customers have filled out this information, Oscar can present them with personalized recommendations rather than a page jam-packed with options that have nothing to do with the user. Oscar even opted to present one potential insurance package at a time to keep people focused and make sure they don’t get overwhelmed This sounds like a site i would run screaming from. Machines are at their best when they help us to think, not when they try to think for us, and it drives me up the wall when a website has information i am interested in and just won't show it to me. Please tell me there is at least an obvious link that just takes you straight to a table of all the plans? Oh, no there isn't.