Maxwell Health Benefits Shopping

Benefits, anywhere

We built a mobile-first solution to make benefits shopping easier for employees.

  • Usability Testing

    We ride-along as users navigate digital experiences while trying to achieve their goals. Sometimes we ask probing questions. Sometimes we just observe. Unearthing friction early costs a conversation. Catching it later could cost the business.

  • Prototyping

    If a picture is a thousand words, a high-fidelity prototype is the entire story. Testing with one gets us past hypothetical reactions and into real behavior, the kind of feedback we can actually trust. With AI-assisted prototypes, we go even deeper, real data, real interactions, insight we couldn’t get any other way.

  • Responsive Design

    We design every feature and flow for every screen it could appear on. The real test isn’t the device, it’s whether every decision still makes sense no matter how someone’s viewing it.

  • Visual Design

    Through imagery, messaging, color and typography, we deliberate over pixels, consistency, readability, contrast, accessibility and creativity.

  • Design Handoff

    Final screens, specifications, documentation, and content assets—organized in Figma and AI-ready Markdown so both your developers and their coding tools can move seamlessly from design to build.

The Challenge

Maxwell Health provides benefits and HR solutions for small to mid-sized businesses managing open enrollment, compliance, and employee benefits. They knew consumer behavior had shifted toward mobile, and they wanted their shopping experience to keep pace.

A traditionally opaque and complicated process of choosing an insurance plan was made seamless with an intuitive wizard
A traditionally opaque and complicated process of choosing an insurance plan was made seamless with an intuitive wizard

But choosing for health benefits is nothing like shopping for consumer goods. When you’re managing a child’s chronic condition, factoring for co-insurance, and making sure your provider is in network, you need to be able to compare the most minute details of your coverage options—all while keeping an eye on the total cost of your enrollment. And when you want to do it in mobile, it becomes a massively complex UX challenge.

Users were brought in throughout for their input on everything from tools they needed, to feature priority to pressure testing the designs.
Users were brought in throughout for their input on everything from tools they needed, to feature priority to pressure testing the designs.

Our Approach

Embedding designers within the Maxwell Health product team, ZeroDegrees helped modernize Maxwell’s benefits shopping experience into a responsive, intuitive application. Simple enough for anyone to use, powerful enough to handle the complexities of insurance realities—all in a scalable platform that allowed Maxwell’s clients to configure things to align with the exact products they offered and business rules they needed to follow.

Chunking up the process into logical and digestible steps was key to enabling a welcoming and easy experience.
Chunking up the process into logical and digestible steps was key to enabling a welcoming and easy experience.

The Results

By designing UX patterns that worked for all of Maxwell’s clients, we gave users all the tools they needed to make benefits enrollment a breeze. Navigation, product comparisons, and complex forms became elegant, mobile-first experiences. Employees could compare plans, dive into the details, waive unwanted benefits, learn about complementary benefits, and submit their elections easily and effortlessly—right from their phone.

We knew we needed help to achieve a mobile-first design but I had no idea how much more ZD would bring to the project.

ZeroDegrees challenged our thinking and pushed our design library into an exciting new territory. The result was an even more elegant and approachable product than we had ever envisioned.

Dana Guiliana, Director of product design, maxwell health