Revenue Impact
$170M+ new premiums
User Impact
35K+ new members
Business Impact
21 new schools
Site Impact
7400 pages down to 618
Aetna Student Health
A fresh redesign for a Fortune 10 healthcare platform serving college students across 33 states.
SHipped
Healthcare · Education · Responsive web · B2C
I joined a 6-month redesign at the halfway point and shipped 20+ pages across the main site, member resources, and footer. In addition to the stats below, the new platform also reduced ongoing maintenance time for content authors by restructuring how plan documents, resources, and forms are shared across schools.
My Role
Senior Product Designer
My Team
3 Designers, PM, Dev
Problem
Aetna Student Health (ASH) provides health insurance to college students across 33 states. The existing website was over 10 years old: 7,400 pages of dense content, no design system, accessibility gaps, and navigation that hadn’t kept pace with how students use sites online.
Solution
A site wide redesign timed to September school onboarding kickoff and align with CVS Health’s Healthier Happens Together platform; a member-first business direction that shaped voice, tone, and imagery across every page.
Measure of success
Tracking visits of the site over the course of a year, new premiums, new members, and the feedback survey on the website.
User types
The redesign was built around three user types:
Aetna Student Health (ASH) provides health insurance to college students across 33 states, with international students making up roughly a third of its member base. The existing website was over 10 years old: 7,400 pages of dense content, no design system, accessibility gaps, and navigation that hadn’t kept pace with how students use sites online.
I’d moved to the US from the UK myself and knew firsthand how disorienting US insurance terminology could be. The redesign was timed to a September school onboarding kickoff and aligned with CVS Health’s Healthier Happens Together platform; a member-first business direction that shaped voice, tone, and imagery across every page.
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First time enrollees
A US college student signing up for a plan, often without much prior insurance literacy.
International students
Landing in the US and navigating American healthcare for the first time, frequently in a second language.
School Administrators
Managing student health insurance for their institution and onboarding new cohorts.
Process & constraints
A competitive analysis was provided at the start of the project. From there, I worked from the established style and component direction into high-fidelity mockups in Figma, iterating page by page based on weekly stakeholder feedback.
I had regular crits, working sessions, and 1:1 reviews with my Lead Designer, and partnered closely with the Content Designer, discussing the best content strategy for each page, then reviewing their copy together.
Once designs were approved, they were annotated and handed off to authors who implemented them in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). I added post-handoff check-ins where helpful to catch implementation drift early.
Every page had to work within a tight set of constraints:
Aetna design system
All components had to come from or extend the existing system.
Accessibility
WCAG 2.1 AA conformance was required across all pages.
Compliance
HIPAA and other healthcare regulations governed how member information could be presented.
Brand layering
Aetna brand sat on top of CVS Health, with ASH as a sub-brand and individual schools (CSCU, Stanford, USC) layered on top of that.
Young consumers are not confident managing healthcare and want simplicity.
In an external study completed of 19–26 year olds, we gathered the following data:
42%
worry about obtaining health insurance
86%
seek a simpler insurance shopping experience
51%
lack confidence in selecting a healthcare plan
52%
of participants rely on friends/family for advice on insurance choices
Key insights
Need for streamlined processes
Need straightforward information
Clearer guidance and resources to assist them
Dependent on friends/family for advice
Solution
Improving website flow and content
Prioritize user experience by avoiding overload and by emphasizing key elements
Enhance engagement through distinctive design elements
Implementation of mobile app
Increase app visibility strategically throughout the website
Highlight key features effectively with engaging content
Incorporate healthcare 101
Emphasize health insurance basics
Tailor content for international students and explore diverse delivery methods
Page Design
How to Use Your Plan
Designing for the moment a student tries to actually use their insurance. The previous version of this page was a wall of text with a handful of PDF links, stacked in one continuous flow. A student looking for one specific piece of information had to scan through all of it to find what they needed. For a student trying to figure out what to do with a new insurance plan, schedule their first appointment, find an in-network provider, file a claim, it offered explanation but no clear next step.
01
Hero Image and Header
A hero that signaled the page’s purpose. I chose an image of a student on her laptop, reading and taking notes; a small visual cue that this page is somewhere you come to learn. For the surrounding palette, I followed Aetna’s “empathetic color” convention, pulling a muted version of the pink in her shirt into the rest of the hero composition so the image and design felt unified rather than layered.
02
Action-oriented, scannable content
The previous page leaned on long paragraphs of legal-style prose. I worked with the content designer to rewrite the same information as short, action-led bullets with key terms bolded inline, making it possible to skim each tab in seconds rather than reading through dense text.
03
Two-level information architecture
I split the content into two journey phase sections: Before you visit a provider and Claims and Payment. Within each, three tabs (Look up coverage / Stay in Network / What to bring, and Claims / What the Plan Pays / What you pay). Splitting the information lessened cognitive load and let a student find their moment in the journey, then the specific question within it.
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Each tab links to where a student would need to go next: the Plan Documents page, the Resources and Forms page, Member Login, the Aetna Vision site, Get Your ID Card page, and the Find Care page. The page is now a routing layer rather than dead end.
Page Design
Surprise Billing
Translating regulatory content into actionable help. Surprise billing: when a student gets an unexpected medical bill from an out-of-network provider, is one of the most stressful moments in healthcare. The previous page acknowledged the topic in a single sentence, with a PDF link to an external infographic for more information. A student already in distress had to download a PDF before they could understand what was happening or what to do next.
01
Hero Image
A hero that named the moment. I chose an image of a student at her laptop, papers in hand and a calculator beside her visibly trying to make sense of something. The papers and calculator hint at numbers, costs, paperwork; the body language signals the emotional state of a user arriving on this page. Following Aetna’s empathetic color convention, I pulled a muted tone from the image into the rest of the hero composition.
02
Action-oriented tabs
I broke the rest of the content into tabs labeled around what the user is trying to figure out. Why, what, how: instead of legal subheadings. Each tab gives them the next piece of information they actually need.
03
A Next Best Action gallery for next steps
At the bottom of the page, I added an NBA gallery with icons linking to the Find Care page, healthcare terms Glossary and the Cost Estimator tool, turning the page into a launching point for help, not a dead end.
04
Centered container
A clear definition at the center of the page. I added a centered container with a large header defining surprise billing in plain language, so it is the first thing a panicked user sees, no scrolling required.
Page Design
School landing pages
The previous school landing pages were dominated by Aetna’s purple, the Aetna brand had completely overtaken the school’s identity. A student at Stanford or USC arriving on their school’s page felt like they were on a CVS/Aetna page that happened to mention their school, rather than a page made for their school.
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School logos
More prominent school identity. I displayed each school’s logo at significantly larger scale, anchoring the page visually around the school rather than around Aetna.
02
A school-led color palette
For each school’s hero, I pulled complementary colors from the school’s brand into the surrounding composition, replacing the all-purple wash with a palette that felt unmistakably of the school while still signaling the underlying Aetna platform.
03
A tabbed structure
I built the body of each page around three tabs — Enroll in a Plan, Find Care, Plan Documents — each with a central container featuring an image and a single clear link to the relevant resource. The structure mirrors the three things a student is most likely to need from their school’s page, in the order they’re most likely to need them.
04
A pictogram NBA gallery
Below the tab section, I added a Next Best Action gallery with pictograms linking to the most useful destinations beyond the core student journey — the Member Login, the How to Use Your Plan page, the Download the App page, and a set of internal wellbeing resources. The gallery turned each school page into a hub rather than a landing point.
What I learned
Working inside a mature design system sharpens decisions. With the Aetna system handling component-level choices, my work was almost entirely about decisions on hierarchy, content structure, and how a page serves a user in a specific moment. This constraint helped to clarify my thinking and design choices.
Plain language is a design choice. Insurance content can be dense by default. Some of the most useful work I did wasn’t visual, it was deciding what a tab should be called, what to put first, and which terms needed an in-context glossary versus a external link out.
The strongest pages were built around the user’s actual moment of need. How to Use Your Plan and Surprise Billing aren’t pages students browse for fun, they’re pages users arrive on when something specific is happening. I was focused on designing for that moment: the question they’re trying to answer, the action they’re trying to take, was the thread that ran through the entire redesign.
Hero imagery was a layered design problem. Each image had to meet several requirements at once: authentic representation across race, ethnicity, gender expression, and age. This was both an Aetna brand guideline and a priority the team held internally, alongside cohesion with the established empathetic color system, and enough variety that pages didn’t all feel the same. Stock photography rarely delivers all three at once. To bridge gaps, I used Adobe Photoshop’s generative AI tools to extend backgrounds, adjust composition, and refine images so they met the brief. It was a useful crash course in where these tools help and where they need a careful human eye.