Patient-facing design for a clinic-in-a-store

In the early 2020s, the client was building something that had never existed before: a network of primary care clinics, dental offices, and vision centers inside its retail stores. Not a pharmacy. Not a walk-in urgent care. A full healthcare destination — primary care, dental, vision, specialist referrals — sitting inside one of the world's largest retail footprints.

The bet made sense on paper. The retailer already had the foot traffic, the real estate, and the trust of a customer base that skewed working-class and cost-conscious. Healthcare in America is expensive and opaque. If anyone could make affordable, accessible primary care work at scale, this company had the infrastructure to try.

The design challenge was to build the patient experience from scratch — onboarding, appointment scheduling across multiple service types, and follow-up — for a product category that didn't exist yet.

I led the team designing the patient-facing experience across all service lines.

The most important design problem on this engagement wasn't scheduling. It was cost. The positioning was built on affordability — the idea that a customer could walk in, know what they were going to pay, and leave without a surprise bill. Healthcare pricing in America works against that promise at almost every level. Insurance variations, service-specific billing structures, and the industry's general resistance to upfront transparency meant that "here's what this visit will cost you" is genuinely hard to deliver — even when the organization is committed to doing it.

I designed the cost communication layer of the patient experience: how costs were surfaced, when they were shown, how they varied by service type and insurance situation, and how to present that information clearly to a mass-market audience that included people for whom a surprise medical bill would be a real financial hardship. Getting this right wasn't cosmetic. It was central to whether the product delivered on its core promise.

The customer base was enormous and varied, and so was the patient population the service needed to serve. I designed across four distinct audience states: people encountering the service for the first time and still deciding whether it was right for them, new patients ready to book their first visit, existing patients returning for follow-up care, and patients with established relationships managing ongoing health needs.

Each state has different information needs, different levels of trust in the system, and different expectations about what the experience should do. Designing an experience that handles all four — without making anyone feel like they're in the wrong flow — required treating audience segmentation as a structural problem, not a content problem.

Primary care, dental, and vision are meaningfully different in how patients think about them, how appointments work, and what follow-up looks like. The experience had to flex across all of them without feeling like three separate products stitched together. I also worked on some provider-facing design — the clinician side of the experience — though the primary focus was the patient.

662 hours of design work over five months. The full patient experience design was delivered and presented directly to the client's Head of Design.

The healthcare venture closed in 2024, a casualty of the economics of healthcare at retail scale — the clinics never reached the density needed to make the model work. That decision was made well above the design layer. The product itself, and the work behind it, were sound.