Context
When someone interacts with a banking app or a travel booking site, a mistake is inconvenient. When someone interacts with a healthcare product, a missed notification or a buried test result isn't an inconvenience — it's anxiety. It can feel like being abandoned.
COVID made this visible to everyone. Telehealth adoption accelerated by a decade in eighteen months. And yet most digital health experiences were built for administrative efficiency — not for the emotional reality of being sick, scared, or simply trying to stay well.
The Opportunity
Between visits, patients are left to manage fragmented information across apps, printed sheets, and memory. The care stops at the clinic door.
Family members who provide daily care — reminders, transportation, emotional support — have no formal place in most healthcare products.
A system that is fast but opaque creates anxiety. The design challenge was building trust first, then building speed on top of it.
Research
I needed to understand what healthcare actually felt like — not how it was supposed to work. That required listening more than asking.
"The problem wasn't that people lacked access to their health data. It was that none of it felt connected — to them, or to each other."
I went into this project expecting to find feature gaps. Instead I found something more fundamental: a breakdown in coherence. Every touchpoint in healthcare was an island.
Patient interviews
Rural and semi-urban India · Chronic condition management · Ages 22–74
Caregiver conversations
Family members coordinating care — the invisible workforce in healthcare
Provider shadowing sessions
Observing how doctors communicated next steps, follow-ups, and referrals
Screens designed
Addressing approximately 90% of the problems identified during research
Yatish
Young citizen
33 yrs, Cochin
IT Professional
90%
Relevance
"Need a family doctor for regular consultations for myself and family."
Goals
· Lead a healthy life with consistent medical support for self and family.
Pain points
· No personal connects with any doctor
· Longer wait time at consultations
· Need to carry papers from different consultations
Personality
Sengupta
Senior citizen
68 yrs, Thiruvallam
Retd. Bank Clerk
80%
Relevance
"Need regular consultations for my diabetes and knee joint pain."
Goals
· Easy connect with health professional consistently and on need basis.
Pain points
· Difficulty in travel outside
· Forgets or misplaces previous health records
· Wait long to get appointment with the same doctor
Personality
Faizal
Family Doctor
42 yrs, Calicut
MD, General Practitioner
85%
Relevance
"Healthcare in India needs a paradigm shift in terms of digital infrastructure."
Goals
· Serve more people and build a bigger network of healthcare professionals.
Pain points
· Unable to connect to a larger pool of people who need services
· Unable to manage appointments optimally
Personality
What changed our thinking
Every participant could access test results online. Almost none felt confident interpreting them. The gap wasn't data — it was context, tone, and a sense that someone was watching over them.
The daughter coordinating her mother's appointments was doing the work of a care coordinator — but had no official role in any system. She worked around every tool, not with them.
Participants recalled exactly how they felt when a doctor rushed them, when a result was buried behind a portal login, when a reminder came too late. Emotional memory outlasts clinical memory.
Providers focused on the visit. Patients felt most lost between visits. The follow-up care, the action items, the sense that the care was continuing — that was where trust was actually built or broken.
Problem Statement
"How might we design a healthcare experience where patients feel continuously held — not just during appointments, but through every moment of managing their health?"
Making Sense of Complexity
The first structural challenge was that patients, doctors, and caregivers needed radically different views of the same underlying information. The IA had to unify them without flattening them.
Patient's family network ↔ Doctor's care network — connected through CogniCure
Early Thinking
The strongest ideas weren't the first ones. Most of the early exploration was about eliminating directions that felt obvious — because obvious, in healthcare, often means cold.
Modeled after hospital EMR systems. Felt like being managed, not cared for. Prioritised completeness over comprehension.
Generated too much anxiety. Patients described a prototype heavy on reminders as 'feeling like an alarm'. Healthcare needs calm, not urgency.
A single coherent daily view — what matters today, what's next, what's been done. Created a sense of being looked after rather than managed.
Onboarding flow
01
Splash + 4 onboarding slides
Value proposition, first impression
02
Sign up via mobile number
OTP verification — no passwords
03
Welcome + questionnaire
9 key health inputs, personalisation
04
Rewards message
Immediate positive reinforcement
05
Dashboard — 0
Personalised home, ready to use
If immediate consultation needed at step 3 → alternate urgent care flow is triggered instead
The Turning Points
Most platforms treated caregivers as external — adding someone as an 'emergency contact' rather than a participant in care.
Role-based permissions only. A read-only 'care portal'. Treating caregivers identically to patients.
Adding a third user type increased IA complexity significantly. It required designing separate entry points and permission models.
The research was clear: the person who remembers appointments, who coordinates between providers, who drives to the pharmacy — that person deserved to be designed for explicitly. Not as an afterthought.
Most follow-up care was communicated through an auto-generated PDF or a brief note that arrived with no structure or human warmth.
Standard discharge summary format. Email-only notifications. App push notifications alone.
Required provider workflow changes — doctors needed to generate structured summaries rather than free-form notes.
The gap between appointments was where anxiety lived. A structured, warm, action-oriented follow-up view turned passive patients into confident participants in their own care.
Healthcare data is extensive. Showing all of it creates a dashboard that feels like a medical chart — complete, but exhausting.
Full data display. Tabbed category views. A search-first approach.
Some clinical information was intentionally not surfaced on the dashboard. Providers initially resisted reducing what patients could see.
Patients didn't need all their information immediately. They needed the right information at the right moment, presented in a way that reduced rather than increased cognitive load.
Need a family doctor who can be always available 🕐
Need consultation for my diabetes & cardiac problems!
Manage and organise all my health data across apps. 📁
Three perspectives, one platform
Dashboard → Consultations → Records → Follow-up
My Circles → Family → Health Wallet
Schedule → Consultation → Patient records
Building Confidence
Round 1: Navigation testing
What we weren't sure about
Could patients find what they needed without instruction?
What we found
The dashboard landing created genuine orientation. Participants started exploring naturally — a sign the hierarchy was working.
What changed
Increased visual weight of the appointment card after two participants missed it on first pass.
Round 2: Caregiver flow
What we weren't sure about
Would family members understand their permission model?
What we found
The 'Family Circle' framing resonated deeply. One caregiver said: 'Finally, I'm actually in the system — not just copied on an email.'
What changed
Added explicit confirmation screens when caregivers were granted new access levels, reducing uncertainty about what sharing meant.
Round 3: Emotional tone
What we weren't sure about
Did the product feel reassuring — not just usable?
What we found
Participants used the word 'calm' unprompted in three of five sessions. One said it felt 'like having a nurse who isn't rushed'.
What changed
Reduced notification density on the dashboard — confirmed our instinct that less urgency created more trust.
Round 4: Provider alignment
What we weren't sure about
Would the doctor-side portal align with clinical workflow?
What we found
The schedule view reduced cognitive overhead. Providers appreciated that patient context was surfaced inline, not behind an extra click.
What changed
Adjusted appointment card density after providers asked for slightly more clinical detail in the list view.
A Language for Care
Every visual decision — color, spacing, type weight, interaction — was in service of one idea: that the product should feel like a person who is calm, organised, and quietly watching out for you.
Deep Navy
#1B3A5C
Teal
#3D9B8F
Teal Light
#BFD8D5
Warm White
#F5F5F0
Display / 40px
Body / 14px
Primary CTA
Ghost
Status badges
Progress
The Experience
Follow a patient from morning to follow-up. Every screen from the production prototype.
Dashboard
The home view — consultations at a glance, energy activity, and incoming invites from your circle.
What Became Better
Participants described the experience using words like 'organised', 'held', and 'calm' — unprompted.
The Family Circle model gave caregivers a designed role — removing the workaround burden entirely.
Follow-up summaries and action items made patients feel the care hadn't ended when the appointment did.
Three distinct user types — patient, caregiver, provider — unified under one coherent information model.
"The most meaningful outcome wasn't a usability score. It was that participants stopped talking about the app — and started talking about how they felt. When someone says 'it felt like someone was actually paying attention', that's the design working."
Reflection
Healthcare is as much about reassurance as it is about functionality.
Designing for the caregiver is designing for the patient — they are part of the same care system.
The most important interaction sometimes happens in the quiet space between screens.
Calm is a design decision. It requires removing as much as adding.
Next Case Study
Industrial Manufacturing · Enterprise
© 2025 Manisha. All rights reserved.