Solace Health · Patient Intake Funnel

The form is the first appointment.

Solace's mission is to pair overwhelmed patients with advocates who navigate the quagmire of healthcare on their behalf — insurance, specialists, appointments, diagnoses. This challenge was designed around a singular question: can the very first form someone fills out establish trust between the patient and Solace?

Take-home design challengeGrowth Product Designer

The Brief

Solace already knew who their users were: the overwhelmed patient, the hesitant first-stepper, the skeptical caregiver. The funnel is the bottleneck to earning their trust.

Context

Solace's advocates fight the healthcare system so patients don't have to.

They're registered nurses and highly trained clinical practitioners operating independently from insurances and hospitals (less bureaucracy means more gets done), and this translates to better care coordination, appointments booked, insurances handled. It's an all-encompassing healthcare journey.

Problem

The funnel obscures its own purpose.

The live funnel at find.solace.health never actually says what it's doing: verifying Medicare eligibility. Instead, "Get Started" gives you a vague inclination of the process ahead, and the questions it does ask are split up and incomplete, thus lengthening a process that could be quickly resolved with asynchronous verification.

Hypothesis

Verify first, then ask for contact.

Give the CTA a name that matches what it does — "Verify Eligibility," not "Get Started." Move email to the very end: once someone's confirmed eligible, contact information is worth asking for instead of a leap of faith upfront. And let verification run quietly in the background instead of leaving people staring at a wait time with no real projection behind it.

Trust first

Social proof and reassurance arrive before the ask for personal information, not after it.

Ask less upfront

Name, date of birth, and a member ID verify Medicare. Email and caretaker questions can wait until after.

Move the wait

Resequence the fields so verification runs while someone's still answering.

The Redesign

Rebuilding the funnel, screen by screen.

Each fix below responds to a specific issue in the original screens.

Show trade-offs I weighed

01 · Landing Page — the live find.solace.health intake, annotated.

Social proof, buried

The 200,000-patient trust signal sits below the form, where the ask for personal information should already be reassured.

Solution: moved the proof pill above the form; hover reveals patient faces and the exact number.

Trade-off: small copy change, but touches multiple screens so worth confirming with engineering first.

Fields out of order

Name, DOB, and a member ID are the only fields Medicare verification needs. Email and "who do you need help for" just add friction at the door.

Solution: resequenced to prioritize verification-critical inputs; pushed email and the caretaker question to the end.

Trade-off: longer screen instead of several short ones. I'd want a usability test to find the right field count.

A vague CTA

"Get Started" is too vague for someone overwhelmed and skeptical about what they're agreeing to.

Solution: changed the button to "Check Your Eligibility," which names the next step, framed in the user's interest.

02 · Medicare Page — no progress signal, no help for an unfamiliar term.

No sense of progress

Without a progress signal, anxious users can't tell how far they've come or how much is left, thus increasing drop-off risk.

Solution: added a segmented progress bar to improve transparency, with each step visibly completed as the user answers.

Trade-off: if remaining steps can change with answers, a static bar could mislead, but needs scoping.

Assumes prior knowledge

"Do you have Medicare?" is a real barrier for an older or overwhelmed audience who may not know what Medicare is, let alone how it differs from other coverage.

Solution: added a "What's a Medicare Advantage Plan?" helper link with a question-mark icon.

Trade-off: needs real design and engineering effort to build an explainer that helps without overwhelming.

Two smaller fixes

Moved the emergency disclaimer to this screen so it doesn't compete with an already dense landing page. Swapped the text-only "Back" for a back-arrow icon, and re-centered the Solace mark.

Future exploration · out of scope for this exercise

Problem: "Do you have Medicare?" branches into several Medicare Advantage Plans, and users may not know which one they have, how to access it online, or where to find the physical card.

Solution: show sample insurance cards with the Member ID clearly displayed, across each listed Medicare Advantage Plan, so users can identify their coverage regardless of which plan they're on.

Trade-off: seeing multiple plan samples could feel overwhelming for users who don't recognize their own. I'd love the chance to explore this further in a future version.

03 · Checking Insurance — redundant copy, and a real question about how long this takes.

Redundant copy

"Checking Medicare Coverage" and "Verifying eligibility" say the same thing twice, without a clear directive for a waiting user.

Solution: consolidated to one line: "Verifying Medicare Coverage," so users don't exit this screen.

Trade-off: less reassuring language could raise anxiety for people who've had prior insurance miscommunications; worth testing both copy variants.

Research question

How long does verification actually take, and could the fetch run asynchronously? A dozen self-run sessions put it at roughly 11–15 seconds, well under the "45 seconds" the copy promises, and short enough to run quietly in the background.

Pushing Further · Version 3

The fastest honest path to "you're covered."

The existing flow asks someone to wait before it finishes verifying insurance, then follows a false "almost done" with more questions. This redesign replaces email with a member ID/SSN field near the top, kicking off verification in the background. By the time someone finishes the location and caretaker questions, their eligibility check is already running, and email is only asked once coverage is confirmed.

~33%

projected drop in perceived wait time, from resequencing alone

a projection from self-run test sessions, not production data

Trade-off: dropping email upfront means users who leave mid-form can't be retargeted, and an SSN is a heavier ask at the door. I'd test whether framing it as a trust signal helps or hurts completion.

Try It

Walk through the final flow.

A working slice of my version, resequenced end to end. Click through it yourself.

Welcome to Solace

Your first step toward a better healthcare experience.

John

Locke

MM/DD/YYYY

XXX-XX-XXXX · Social Security Number

California ⌄

Verification starts the moment you continue — no separate wait screen later.

Before & After

The same screen, resequenced.

Before

After · V3

Landing page

Recommendation

This redesign focuses on faster verification, cuts a dead screen, and delivers on the transparency and care Solace already promises to people who are overwhelmed, hesitant, and skeptical before they're even paired with an advocate. That's trust.

What I'd test next