Health insurance bill is a great example. But an even better example is the garbage that I get from my insurance provider a week or so after any member of my family visits a doctor. It usually has on it somewhere…<p><i></i>THIS IS NOT A BILL<i></i><p>Then what is it? What it <i>is</i> is a piece of paper filled with meaningless jargon, and now I have to figure out what to do with it.<p>Stop wasting paper, time and money unless I need to do something. If it's something I <i>might</i> conceivably need someday to prove I was there, then let me just go on your damn site and download a PDF when that hypothetical day comes.
From a conversion rate optimization perspective you guys should double-down on your "keep it simple" mantra.<p>The homepage is gorgeous, and it looks exactly like what I WANT.<p>However, in my experience with CRO it's not exactly what you NEED.<p>There are nearly 40 mouse-over or clickable actions.<p>There is a cornucopia of colors, images, and even animations.<p>The major "above-the-fold" call to action "See how we're different" is capitalized (harder to read) and doesn't look like a traditionally clickable element to the average person (underlined to indicate link / button like / etc).<p>I would propose that you test something dramatically simpler: check out Optimizely.com today.<p>I've watched www.Optimizely.com evolve with interest over the past few years.<p>They continue to strip away superfluous information from their fundamental action of "see the benefit" in motion.<p>Their site used to look much more like what you have today - have a look at last October:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20131024222550/https://www.optimizely.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20131024222550/https://www.optim...</a><p>I have adapted their "CHOP IT" strategy to several clients with ~2/3 responding in a positive CRO direction.<p>It strikes me that you could fit your headline in along with your primary call to action / benefit and probably close more biz.
<i>Sorry if this post is long for people.</i><p>As someone running NoScript to enable/disable Javascript per domain. I had to grant about a dozen different domains the ability to run javascript in order to view this page as the authors meant it. Here is a list of those domains:<p>Scratch that, I just counted and it's not a dozen. It's <i>21</i> different domains!<p>firstround.com<p>adroll.com<p>disquscdn.com<p>googleapis.com<p>manetate.net<p>mxpnl.com<p>addthis.com<p>tynt.com<p>disqus.com<p>cloudfront.net<p>wistia.com<p>fonts.com<p>facebook.com<p>gstatic.com<p>linkedin.com<p>s3.amazonaws.com<p>gaug.es<p>umanoapp.com<p>twitter.com<p>typekit.com<p>google-analytics.com<p>This is the sort of thing I see on what I like to call ad-mill websites. Pretty much the seedy tabloids of the internet, and it's unfortunate that their message will probably not reach people that aren't willing to enable javascript willy-nilly for every domain this site decided it needs.
Is this a joke? As a designer I looked at two things: their landing page banner and their revamped bill design. Both are terrible.<p>The banner is large bloated text crushed together, muddled by poor color contrast, offering no reward for making the effort to decipher it.<p>The bill is worse. The "bad" example is exaggerated by fluff (adjustment lines & benefactors) but at least makes a case for what's due when and why. The "good" bill comes off like a phishing scam: you owe us so pay us, in headline print size, without explanation or context. Bad juju.
It's great that the Oscar team is doing this - they seem like smart, dedicated guys. That said, they've chosen a very difficult market, and it's hard to see how they can build a profitable business around this:<p>1) The Affordable Care Act caps the profits of insurance companies through the imposition of the Medical Loss Ratio (see <a href="https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/medical-loss-ratio-MLR/" rel="nofollow">https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/medical-loss-ratio-MLR/</a>). Insurance companies literally have to pay back excess profits to policyholders.<p>2) The ACA also eliminates medical underwriting (discriminating based on prior medical history) and imposes guaranteed issue (requiring insurers to accept all applicants), making it impossible to gain competitive advantage by cherry-picking which customers to insure (like GEICO does in auto insurance).<p>The net effect is that insurance companies have basically become utilities. All that's left is to go for scale and efficiency, but this is a heavily regulated, very fragmented space and that greatly constrains how fast you can grow.<p>All that said I commend these folks for doing this - definitely a step in a right direction in an industry that could use it.
<i>By the time prospective customers have filled out this information, Oscar can present them with personalized recommendations rather than a page jam-packed with options that have nothing to do with the user.</i><p><i>Oscar even opted to present one potential insurance package at a time to keep people focused and make sure they don’t get overwhelmed</i><p>This sounds like a site i would run screaming from. Machines are at their best when they help us to think, not when they try to think for us, and it drives me up the wall when a website has information i am interested in and just won't show it to me.<p>Please tell me there is at least an obvious link that just takes you straight to a table of all the plans?<p>Oh, no there isn't.
> <i>While its core offering is basic — it collects money from members and pays for their care when they need it</i>...<p>Right, so you just described the concept of 'health insurance', any/all health insurance. Which is not necessarily 'basic' at all in practice. What was the author trying to say here exactly?