Centene Corp

Centene Corp

At Centene, I led UX strategy and product design across complex healthcare experiences supporting large-scale member and internal business needs. My role went beyond designing interfaces—I worked across product, engineering, research, and business teams to turn complicated requirements into experiences people could understand and use.

Role:

Senior UX Product Designer

Environment:

Enterprise Healthcare

Focus:

UX Strategy · Product Design · Accessibility · Cross-functional Collaboration · Design Systems

I Can Explain

The Challenge Was Bigger Than the Interface

Healthcare products come with layers of complexity from federal requirements and accessibility standards to technical constraints, changing priorities, and the needs of people from different backgrounds. Solving the UX problem often meant understanding how those factors affected both the experience and the team responsible for delivering it.

Healthcare products come with layers of complexity from federal requirements and accessibility standards to technical constraints, changing priorities, and the needs of people from different backgrounds. Solving the UX problem often meant understanding how those factors affected both the experience and the team responsible for delivering it.

Design System

I identified inconsistencies across existing design assets and helped evolve patterns to improve consistency while meeting
WCAG accessibility requirements.

New Consumer Facing Payment Page

I designed a new consumer-facing payment experience that needed to make a complex, federally regulated process
clear and easy to complete.

Adapting Through Change

When an RBAC initiative faced significant technical changes without a corresponding change to the deadline,
I stepped in to help the team adapt the designs and keep delivery moving.

Each challenge required a different response that resulted in a consistent outcome, successful delivery.
Focusing on understand what had changed, determine what the team and users needed most, and create a clear path forward without losing sight of the experience we were trying to deliver.

Design System

Challenge

The design system had inconsistencies across existing assets, while accessibility requirements meant that simply standardizing what already existed wasn’t enough. Patterns needed to become more consistent while continuing to support the needs of a large healthcare product environment.

My Approach

The design system had inconsistencies across existing assets, while accessibility requirements meant that simply standardizing what already existed wasn’t enough. Patterns needed to become more consistent while continuing to support the needs of a large healthcare product environment.

Identify Inconsistencies

I reviewed existing components and patterns to identify where visual and interaction inconsistencies were creating unnecessary variation across experiences.

Evaluate accessibility

Patterns were failing against WCAG requirements. This required me to devote necessary attention to updating accessibility ensuring designs succeeded during final compliance check.

Strengthen patterns

I refined reusable patterns to solve recurring design problems consistently instead of addressing the same issues independently across screens.

Think beyond the immediate feature

I considered how each change could affect other products, workflows, and experiences that relied on the same shared patterns.

Visual Story

The work moved from identifying inconsistencies to refining components and validating how updated patterns could work across the larger experience.

Outcome

Greater consistency across experiences while strengthening accessibility and creating more dependable, reusable design patterns.

What This Demonstrated

This work strengthened my systems thinking. I wasn’t only asking whether a design worked for the screen in front of me, I was considering how the decision would behave across the larger product ecosystem.

Introduction to Centene

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My First Project Was The

Starting with the team’s current design system helped me quickly learn design patterns and ensure consistency.

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Design System

My initial tasks at Centene involved designing components for the design system that were assigned to their backlog.

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New Consumer Facing Payment Page

Challenge

I was still new to the team when I was asked to design a consumer-facing payment experience with federal and accessibility requirements. My biggest challenge was learning the existing design patterns while designing the product, so the experience didn’t feel disconnected from the rest of the ecosystem.

My Approach

Rather than designing the payment experience in isolation, I used existing products, established patterns, team knowledge, and feedback to understand how the experience should behave. As I learned the system, I applied those patterns to the payment flow while determining where the new experience required something different.

Learn Existing Patterns

I reviewed existing products and design assets to understand the components, behaviors, and conventions users were already familiar with.

Understand Requirements

I worked through the business, federal, accessibility, and product requirements to understand what the experience needed to support.

Map the User Task

I broke the payment process into the information, decisions, and actions consumers needed to complete the task successfully.

Design for Consistency

I applied established patterns wherever possible so the new payment experience felt connected to the broader product ecosystem.

Explore and Validate

I used flows, wireframes, prototypes, and team feedback to refine the experience while continuing to learn how existing patterns were intended to work.

Outcome

I delivered a payment experience that met its requirements while remaining consistent with the larger product experience and gained a much deeper understanding of the system I was designing within.

What This Demonstrated

This project taught me how to design effectively while still learning an established product ecosystem. Instead of allowing what I didn’t know to slow the work down, I used the existing products, patterns, and knowledge of the team to learn quickly and make more informed design decisions.

Adapting Through Change

Challenge

Reorganization changed team responsibilities while active projects still had deadlines to meet.
During an RBAC initiative and team launching the entire system in a new platform, significant technical changes affected the design, but the delivery timeline remained the same.

My Approach

As usual, my first thought is to assess everything and empathize with departed team members while building a lost of what projects will be impacted.
Focusing on the changes, what remained valid, and the team needs to keep progressing. Emphasizing flexibility, I adapted the work around the new constraints and prioritized the decisions that mattered most.

Assess the Impact

Identify which products and deadlines were actually affected and how.

Prioritize the Work

Separate immediate delivery needs from decisions that could wait.

Anticipate

Recognize statuses and resolve design, engineering, and stakeholder questions before they became blockers.

Support the Team

After organizing my assignments, assisted other designers working through problems, strengthen their reasoning, and maintain continuity as responsibilities shift.

Outcome

The work continued through significant technical and organizational change, while my role evolved from managing my own designs to helping the team navigate problems together.

What I Took From Centene

Everything.
Centene strengthened how I work inside complex product environments. I learned that difficult UX problems aren’t always solved by designing more; they’re often solved by understanding the right problem, creating alignment earlier, and anticipating what users, stakeholders, and the team will need next.

My role grew from designing experiences to helping teams navigate the complexity surrounding them. That evolution continues to shape how I approach product design today. Most importantly, I improved at listening, empathizing, understanding how people communicate, and being patient.

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