Renewing contracts with 5,000 hospitals, without the dread.
Cigna's analysts and contractors renew agreements with hospitals around the world through an internal web app. I led the design of its redesign, from research through handoff, and helped build the design system that carried it.
This is an internal tool, so there are no real screenshots here. The renewal sheet below is an illustration with invented data; the numbers are from my résumé.
Faster renewals, clearer conversations, and a design system teams actually used.
Renewal work is high-stakes paperwork: many hospitals, many deadlines, many people touching one agreement. My job was to make the next step obvious for the analyst in the middle of it, and to make that clarity repeatable across the team's other tools.
Renewals with thousands of hospitals ran slow, and the back-and-forth was the bottleneck.
Cigna renews agreements with more than 5,000 hospitals worldwide. Over 100 analysts and contractors work those renewals through an internal web application, reading contract terms, tracking deadlines and chasing hospitals for responses.
The work was data-heavy by nature. The tool made it heavier: complex information had to be pieced together across views, and communication between hospitals and Cigna didn't have a clear home. That slowed every renewal down.
Why the business cared: every late renewal is money and relationship risk. Faster, clearer renewals meant real savings and happier hospital partners.
I started with a research plan, not a redesign.
Before touching the UI, I wrote a detailed UX research plan that pinned down the project goals and what we needed to learn. Getting stakeholders to agree on the plan early did a lot of the alignment work for us later.
- Qualitative research with the analysts and contractors doing renewals every day.
- Qualitative user testing of the existing workflows and our redesign concepts.
- Insights presented directly to executives and stakeholders, so decisions were made on evidence, not opinion.
A UXR plan first. Clear goals and questions before any pixels. It got everyone agreeing on the problem.
Watch real renewals. Research with the people doing the work showed where the information got hard to read.
Bring it to the top. I presented findings straight to executives, so the redesign had a clear mandate.
Redesigning the workflows and the charts, so the next step is obvious.
I redesigned the data-heavy workflows and visualizations analysts used to understand a contract and act on it. The goal was fewer places to look and more reliable signals, so an analyst could scan a renewal and know what it needed.
The redesign let analysts and contractors interpret complex information more efficiently, cutting cognitive load by 70%.
A design system of 150+ components, accessible from the start.
One redesigned tool doesn't help much if the next tool drifts. With UX and engineering, I helped design and implement a scalable design system of 150+ accessible, responsive components, grounded in WCAG standards.
I owned the end-to-end handoff: annotated specs, interaction documentation and developer-ready assets in Figma. Having been the engineer on the other side of a handoff, I wrote specs I would have wanted to receive.
System adoption across teams went up 90%.
A spec is a recipe. If the cook has to guess, it isn't finished.How I approach handoff
What changed, in numbers.
Presenting to 400+ people taught me to lead with the before/after and the decision log, not the process. Executives approve what they can see and trace.
Training the next cooks.
10+ interns and new hires. I taught enterprise design thinking, UX practice, information architecture and systems thinking, and helped rework onboarding. New-hire productivity improved by 90%.
Instrument earlier. The strongest results came late. Next time I'd agree on the success metrics in the research plan, so we could track them from the first release.
