Welcome to the UX Rundown. In this series, we share quick, actionable UX breakdowns of real apps and websites – spot what works, what doesn’t, and learn how to apply it to your own designs.

Learn how to design better user interfaces and improve UX navigation in content-heavy dashboards and complex websites.

In this episode of the UX Rundown, we break down real examples from Aetna's healthcare platform and a banking interface to show you how to prioritize essential features and create intuitive navigation that users actually understand.

What you'll learn in this UX tutorial:

We'll examine why Aetna's healthcare dashboard succeeds where others fail, test a banking interface redesign, and show you step-by-step UX research methods you can use to improve your own designs. Perfect for UX designers, product managers, and anyone creating user interfaces with multiple features.

Chapters:

  • 0:00 - Introduction: When content-heavy design works

  • 0:52 - Aetna's healthcare dashboard breakdown

  • 1:47 - The power of quick actions (Amazon, Gmail, Spotify examples)

  • 2:39 - Banking dashboard case study

  • 3:24 - Testing the original design with first click testing

  • 4:16 - Redesigning the banking app

  • 4:36 - Testing results: 90% success rate and faster clicks

  • 5:05 - Key takeaways for content-heavy interfaces

Transcript

When you think of great design, you probably don't think of a cluttered dashboard with a million options. You probably think of something that's minimal, clear and easy to navigate. Here's the reality. Some products have a lot of content. Ecommerce sites with lots of products, banking apps, with a ton of options.

And in today's example, healthcare dashboards. They're packed with details, claims, forms, PDFs, provider directories. And if the navigation isn't intuitive, then finding something that you need, like your ID card or trying to submit a claim, can go from frustrating to feeling impossible. I'm Joe Formica and this is the UX Rundown.

In each episode, we take a look at real apps, websites, and features to see what's working, what's not, and what we can learn to create better user experiences in our own work. Now, let's take a look at our example today, which is a healthcare dashboard that gets it right. Aetna Health. Yes, there is a lot you can do on this site.

There are claims, benefits, providers, breakdowns, plans, but Aetna does a really good job of choosing what to surface. Quick side note, when I was looking for examples from other healthcare portals, most of what I found were step-by-step PDFs, showing users how to do things like file a claim. If your site needs a big PDF, with instructions just to help people find something, that's probably a pretty good sign that your navigation needs some work. Right at the top, there's a quick actions bar with the things that people need most. Find a provider, find a dentist. Get quick care and view your providers. And even the secondary actions like checking recent claims or finding your ID card are easy to spot without digging through menus.

This principle applies everywhere when you have something that is essential or maybe even time sensitive, you want to make that as obvious, clear, and findable as possible. And we see this in tons of other successful products. Amazon makes it super easy to reorder something in one click. Gmail breaks up your emails into different tabs and categories, and Spotify keeps those recently played songs and podcasts right at the top of your home screen so you can jump back into listening without too much thought.

These patterns aren't just about convenience. They prevent frustration and hesitation on the part of the user. Is there an app or website that you've used that makes it quick and easy to find what you're looking for? Maybe one that's cluttered and makes you dig around too much. Share an example in the comments, and I'd love to check it out.

Now we're gonna take a look at an example where those key actions aren't quite as easy to find, and we're going to see how we'd improve it. All right, so imagine logging into your bank or credit card dashboard. You want to find your recurring charges. Think about those monthly subscriptions that quietly add up.

Here's the problem with this current layout. The only way to do that is through this panel. Once you open it, recurring charges is buried under a layer of different sorting and filtering options. Meanwhile, the page is full of a bunch of other distractions. Dropdown menus for view, sort by, show transactions, category menus that look relevant but don't really help.

So it was hard for me to find these recurring charges, but I wanted to run some tests and validate that. So I set up a first click test in Lyssna, which basically shows users this dashboard screen and asks them where they would click to find those monthly recurring charges. Running a first click test like this one will get you two things back.

You'll be able to see how often people clicked in the correct spot and how long it took them. We ran the test and here's what we got. Only about 20% of people clicked through to the correct filter panel. The rest clicked on a mix of all these different category and sorting options that wouldn't get you to those recurring subscriptions, and the average time to the first click was about 10 seconds.

Even after having a couple seconds to click around and see where things were, it was clear that the confidence was low. People weren't really sure that they clicked on the right thing, and in most cases they didn't. So here's how I tried to improve it. I added a quick filters bar right above the transactions list with a bunch of these highly used filters and actions.

A way to see all transactions this month, credits only, and of course, recurring charges. No digging through panels, no second guessing. Just tap the filter that you need. So we tested it again using the exact same study in Lyssna, except this time with our updated dashboard. 90% of users clicked that filter immediately, and the time to first click dropped from 10 seconds to about three seconds.

Confidence jumped to over 95%. People knew they were clicking in the right place, and we could see this across all of our results. This is the power of making these key options obvious and being able to test and validate it with research. The big takeaway here – learn from your users about what they're using most and prioritize that.

Make it easy and obvious to find. Even with really content heavy sites, users shouldn't have to dig through tons of menus or hunt around for the thing that they're looking for. Bring those key actions to the front. Cut down the clutter and test out your design to make sure that it works when it counts.

If you've got any other ideas for apps, websites, or features that you wanna see me break down next, let me know. And of course, if you want to get started with testing your own designs quickly, efficiently, and effectively, head over to lyssna.com and get started for free. Thanks.