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healios Healthcare Mobile app
Product design case study

Turning a lifetime of scattered health data into one calm, legible app

A series of feature designs and redesigns for healios — a platform that unifies a person's medical records, then helps them actually understand them.

Role
UX / UI product design
Platform
iOS · white-label health app
Scope
Onboarding, Health Summary, Vitals, Labs, Providers
healios Health Summary screen
healios app screens: Lab Detail, Health Summary, Labs, Vitals
Four corners of the app this case study touches — Labs, Health Summary and Vitals.
01

About the project

healios is a white-label digital health platform. It pulls a person's medical records — from providers, labs and insurers — into a single place, so they can monitor and manage their own health instead of chasing paperwork across a dozen portals.

The product already existed. The work here was to design new features and rethink existing ones so the experience matched the promise: not just storing health data, but making it understandable.

This study walks through five connected pieces of work — a trustworthy onboarding flow for connecting sensitive records, a phased Health Summary, and clearer Vitals, Labs and provider search.

Each one started from the same question: where does the experience get in the way of a person understanding their own health?

02

The problem

A person's health history lives in dozens of disconnected systems. Even once healios brings it together, raw data isn't the same as understanding. A few core problems kept surfacing across the app.

The core tension

Bringing data together is only half the job

Connecting records is what healios does — but data dumped into an interface doesn't help anyone. The harder design problem was turning that data into something a person can trust, read and act on.

Friction 01

Trust is the real onboarding barrier

Connecting records means handing over deeply private data and verifying identity. Any confusion or unexplained step, and people abandon before they ever see value.

Friction 02

Data without meaning

Grey containers and flat hierarchy buried the numbers. Nothing told a user whether a reading was healthy, borderline or worrying.

Friction 03

Findability

Lab results were grouped only by date, with no search or filter — so tracking a single result over time meant scrolling endlessly.

Friction 04

Risk of the wrong choice

The provider database is huge and full of duplicate names, making it easy to accidentally connect to the wrong doctor.

03

The design-thinking process

Rather than redesign by taste, each feature moved through the same loop — understand the problem, frame it, explore broadly, then de-risk the hard parts with prototypes and testing before committing.

1
Empathise

Audit & research

Reviewed the existing app and talked to stakeholders to map where users got stuck.

2
Define

Frame the problem

Distilled the noise into four clear frictions: trust, legibility, findability, certainty.

3
Ideate

Explore widely

Sketched flows and layouts — and made the call to strip out the grey containers entirely.

4
Prototype

Build the risky bits

Turned the highest-risk flow — the ID scan and facial match — into an interactive prototype.

5
Test

Validate & iterate

Ran usability tests, watched for drop-off, and refined before anything reached build.

04

The solutions

Five pieces of work, each tackling one of the frictions above — built and validated through the loop, then shipped.

S1

Onboarding that earns trust

Tackling Friction 01. Connecting records means asking for sensitive data, so the north star was a single feeling: this is safe, and here's exactly why we're asking. Three different authorization paths had to share that calm.

Explain the “why” at every step

The flow narrates what's happening as it happens — choosing what to connect, searching on the user's behalf, and confirming when records land.

  • Pre-verified users grant permission and watch a narrated search
  • HIPAA-protected users get records pulled automatically to confirm
  • Unauthorised users complete an ID scan and facial match
🔒 Designed to reassure, not just collect
healios screens: choosing health records, searching, and confirmation that data was connected
Choosing what to connect → searching → confirmation.

Identity, kept calm

The riskiest part — verifying identity with an ID scan and mobile check — was prototyped and user-tested first. Honest waiting states set expectations when a connection takes time.

The result: low drop-off through authorization in testing — a strong signal the reassurance was working.

healios identity verification: verify identity, confirm personal data, verify mobile
Identity verification — legible despite handling sensitive data.
healios waiting state while looking for the user's records
A patient, honest waiting state — records can take up to 24 hours.
S2

Health Summary, shipped in phases

Health Summary lets users compile a PDF of everything — visits, diagnoses, lab results and more. To get value out fast, it was designed as nine phases, each building on the last, starting from a bare download-only flow.

Nine-phase rolloutDownload → full toolkit
01
Download
02
Categories
03
Timeframe
04
Filter
05
History
06
Upload
07
Sharing
08
Sensitive
09
Summary
healios Health Summary download flow: prompt, progress, completion
Phase one — the download-only flow, shipped first.
healios Health Summary share and upload documents flow
Later phases — sharing and uploading your own documents.

Rebuilding the PDF itself

The exported document — the thing a patient hands to a doctor — was redesigned for clarity, with readable hierarchy and room to breathe.

  • Clear typographic hierarchy replaced dense blocks
  • Grouped, scannable sections instead of raw dumps
  • Designed to be understood, not just produced
healios Health Summary PDF before and after redesign
The Health Summary PDF — before (left), after (right).
S3

Vitals — making numbers readable

Tackling Friction 02. The data was already there; it just wasn't legible. Grey containers smothered the content and nothing signalled whether a number was good or worrying.

Kill the grey boxes

The most important move was the simplest: remove the grey containers and let white space do the work. A proper type system fixed the hierarchy, and the section instantly felt airier.

Then, to make health legible at a glance, came five clear indicator levels — each with its own colour and icon.

healios vitals cards with colour-coded status indicators
Vitals cards — status readable at a glance.
Low
Below safe
Below range
Watch
In range
Healthy
Above range
Watch
High
Above safe
healios vitals detail and pinned vitals overview
Detail and overview — pinned vitals with clear in-range / below / high states.
S4

Labs — from a wall of dates to something you can search

Tackling Friction 03. Everything was grouped by date with no search or filter, so finding a single result was a slog. The goal: make Labs genuinely useful for health monitoring.

Iterated until it was clear

  • Made each result its own item in the list
  • Removed the grey blocks — consistent with Vitals
  • Added an indicator for a quick result preview
  • Introduced search and filter

On the detail page, the chart now tracks one result over time against its healthy range.

healios Labs list before and after, with search, filter and indicators
Grouped dates (left) become a searchable, scannable list (right).
healios Lab Detail with history and trend chart against a healthy range
Lab Detail — trend over time with the healthy range plotted in.
S5

Provider search — no wrong doctor

Tackling Friction 04. With a huge database and duplicate names, search had to make it impossible to connect to the wrong person by accident.

Make the right choice obvious

Each doctor's office location is prominent and tappable, so people can confirm they've found the right person. A “Request Connection” action lets users ask to join a doctor's health system if they aren't in it yet.

healios Search Connections by Provider results with expandable locations
Locations made visible and tappable to confirm the right provider.
05

Takeaways

A few lessons that outlasted the individual screens.

01

Trust is designed, not declared

Explaining the “why” at each step — and prototyping the scariest flow before building it — kept people moving through identity verification instead of bailing.

02

White space is a feature

Removing the grey containers did more for legibility than any new component. The biggest readability win came from taking things away.

03

Ship in phases

Designing Health Summary as nine incremental releases put value in users' hands immediately and de-risked the build for engineering.

04

Design for the glance

A five-level colour-and-icon system turned raw vitals into something understandable in a second — and was later adopted across the whole platform.

The outcome

What the work moved

Low drop-off
Through the redesigned identity-verification flow in user testing
9 phases
Incremental releases designed for Health Summary alone
Platform-wide
The new Vitals visual style was rolled out across the product
End of Case Study