Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield
Broker Online Services — desktop navigation and broker journeys, designed for people who are not power users.
- UI/UX Design Consultant
- Horizon Blue Shield of New Jersey
- Broker Online Services
- 2024 – 2025
- Healthcare and pharmacy SaaS
- Web
Navigation people can predict, for an audience that cannot afford to guess.
Broker Online Services is how brokers work with Horizon Blue Shield of New Jersey — managing books of business, clients, quotes and renewals. The work here is the navigation and the journeys underneath it: the desktop side panel, the tab and mega menu structure above it, and the broker flows mapped end to end so the two agree with each other.
The audience shaped every decision. In Todd’s own words the side panel was refined “to enhance usability, especially for older users” — which meant familiar affordances over clever ones, and predictability over density.
The same instinct shows up on the member side of the account, in a dental cost lookup that states plainly what its numbers are — estimates of what dentists charge before insurance, for a given area — and keeps a glossary open beside the results for anyone who does not already speak in procedure codes.
- Desktop side panel — expand and collapse behaviour, interaction states
- Tab and mega menu structure for the desktop navigation
- Broker journeys mapped end to end, including renewal and recovery flows
- A three-step broker onboarding wizard, and a member-facing dental cost lookup
- Accessibility carried as the reason for the design, not a check at the end
The questions the navigation had to answer.
- 01How might we make it obvious that a menu section opens and closes, to someone who has never assumed it would?
- 02How might we replace inconsistent colour changes with hover and click behaviour that is the same everywhere?
- 03How might we get a broker to what they need in fewer clicks without hiding anything?
- 04How might we structure a large content set so a wide range of it is reachable without clutter?
- 05How might we decide how many top-level tabs is the right number, rather than arguing about it?
Five areas of design work.
The desktop side panel
- A chevron arrow giving a familiar way to open and close menu subsections, reducing confusion
- Standardised hover and click actions replacing inconsistent colour changes, making navigation predictable
- A simplified interaction model — fewer clicks, and better for assistive technology
Tabs and a mega menu
- Related topics grouped under well-labelled tabs
- Extensive subcategories organized inside one visually accessible mega menu
- Quick access to a wide range of content with minimal clutter
Seven tabs, on purpose
- Tab count set against cognitive-load research rather than negotiated
- Miller’s Law — roughly seven, plus or minus two, is what someone processes comfortably at once
- The limit keeps the interface uncluttered and reduces decision fatigue
Broker journeys, mapped
- A master broker journey covering the whole book of business on one canvas
- Renewal, password recovery and reason-selection flows drawn to the same standard
- Decision points made explicit, so the navigation above could be checked against the journeys underneath
Designing for the actual audience
- Older and less confident users treated as the default, not the edge case
- Familiar affordances chosen over novel ones wherever the two competed
- Accessibility argued as the reason for a decision, not audited in afterwards
Predictable beats clever.
A navigation that behaves the same way twice. One interaction model across the side panel means the second visit teaches nothing new — which is the point.
Less hunting. Tabs plus a mega menu put a wide range of content within reach without spreading it across extra clicks or extra pages.
A reason behind the structure. The tab count came from cognitive-load research rather than from whoever argued hardest, which made it easy to hold when new sections were proposed.