Redesigning Trust: A Digital Experience for Senior Independence
When seniors and caregivers can’t understand a healthcare program, the experience breaks before care begins. This project focused on making the service legible, trustworthy, and accessible.
Client
Center for Elders' Independence
Role
UX Lead
Year
The Center for Elders' Independence delivers comprehensive healthcare through PACE — a federally funded program that helps seniors live independently rather than enter nursing facilities. CEI serves 274,000+ users annually across English, Spanish, and Chinese-speaking communities in the Bay Area.
The website hadn't been redesigned in years. As CEI expanded locations and programs, the site couldn't keep up — and more importantly, it wasn't helping the people who needed it most understand what PACE was, whether they qualified, or how to take the first step.
Quick stats
Engagement Lift · +43% YoY Methods · Stakeholder interviews, heuristic evaluation, IA restructure, content strategy, prototyping Audiences · Seniors 65+, adult caregivers, multilingual communities
The Core Problem
"A program like this must be expensive."
That assumption, while incorrect, was costing people access to care they were entitled to.
This wasn't just a visual refresh problem.
Through research insights and stakeholder conversations, we saw that the issue was deeper than a superficial UI overhaul:
Many seniors didn’t understand what PACE was or how it can be covered through insurance.
Caregivers struggled to compare options and make confident decisions without needed context.
Cost misconceptions created hesitation.
Users felt overwhelmed by healthcare terminology.
The website required users to piece together information across pages that did not follow a logical flow.
The design challenge was fundamentally about comprehension and trust, not aesthetics.
Artifacts that made the service visible
Current state audit · Content, infrastructure, assets, functionality.
Stakeholder interviews · Operations, enrollment coordinators, and front desk staff surfaced the back-stage friction users never see
Two audiences, one journey. But, completely different needs.
Seniors navigating their own care and adult caregivers advocating for a parent share the same starting point — confusion — but make decisions very differently. Seniors prioritize trust and human connection. Caregivers want specifics: eligibility criteria, cost, location, what the program actually covers day to day. Designing for both meant the IA had to work two ways simultaneously: emotionally reassuring at the top level, operationally specific one level deeper. The navigation restructure — from 13 fragmented items to 6 goal-oriented sections — was the single most impactful change.
Cost misconceptions blocked enrollment before it started.
Users assumed PACE was expensive — similar to private assisted living. The site never corrected this. Transparent, plain-language cost information needed to surface early, not be buried in FAQs.
Caregivers needed a different path than seniors.
Adult children doing research for a parent wanted clinical specifics — services covered, staff credentials, location details. Seniors wanted to feel safe and understood. The site treated them as one audience.
Trust came from specificity, not warmth.
Generic "we care about you" language wasn't building trust. What actually moved users was seeing real staff profiles, specific program details, and transparent eligibility criteria. Credibility came from showing, not telling.
Trust through transparency.
We designed dedicated modules for cost and eligibility that surfaced answers without requiring users to call or dig. Plain language, no jargon, clear next steps. The guiding principle: if users can understand CEI quickly, they can trust it.
Designed beyond the launch.
CEI's staff needed to be able to update and expand content without developer dependency. We built a modular CMS-driven template system so the site could grow alongside programs — making scalability a design goal, not an afterthought.
The redesigned site launched in May 2025. Both sessions and pageviews increased steadily through the year, with August 2025 marking peak traffic. The updated IA allowed users to explore content more deeply — finding program details, cost information, and enrollment next steps without friction. The modular content system reduced CEI's reliance on developers and gave the internal team the ability to keep the site current as programs evolved.
What this project reinforced
CEI reinforced something I've come to believe about healthcare UX: clarity is a form of care. When someone is trying to figure out whether their aging parent can get help staying at home, every moment of confusion is a barrier to something that actually matters. The most important design decisions on this project weren't visual — they were structural. Restructuring the IA, surfacing cost information early, and writing in plain language were the interventions that moved the needle. The visual refresh followed that foundation, not the other way around.
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