DoctorLink

DoctorLink:
Kick-starting a nimble design system

I lead the work to define a lightweight and flexible design system for a healthcare product. The goal was to enable the product to rapidly improve based on continuous research and testing insights as well as grow in its functional capabilities.

Design that
works for everyone

DoctorLink is a medical technology company, that helps United Kingdom's healthcare organisations to deliver more timely and relevant services and deal with the growing demand through digitisation. Two of the key challenges that the organisation was dealing with was the need to provide a relatively small team with the means to effectively scale the product and significantly improve its user experience.

Frictionless onboarding

Due to its relative autonomy from the core features, the onboarding experience was a good environment to test out the new assumptions about the optimisation of the visual and interaction design patterns.

Given an incredibly diverse range of users that medical clinics provide services to, the goal was to create a visual and interaction system that would be accessible to everyone, regardless of their age, medical condition, language or culture.

Symptom checker

By breaking down and spreading complex questions across multiple steps and indicating an estimate of how long the diagnostics will take, we managed to find a sound balance between making the process more accessible and less tedious.

Many platforms,
one framework

At the time, DoctorLink's team was fairly small and required tools that would help them design and develop the product for multiple platforms quickly. This informed a unification of designs across all of the touchpoints.

Accessible,
equal and open

Creating a more accessible design meant doing it both for the consumer and the team. Enabling every member of the team to adopt and further develop the system leads to an increase in consistency and quality of the end-user experience.

Layouts that design themselves

Standardised, pre-configured layouts and components made it possible to quickly put together easy-to-read interfaces, increasing the team's capacity to quickly respond to users' feedback and needs as well as introduce new features.

Lead by accessibility

Accessibility was the key measure of how appropriate a design decision is. This idea permeated every aspect of work - whether it's a visual contrast or compatibility with assistive technology.

Leveraging open source

Adopting an open-source typeface Noto Sans made it possible to prepare the product for multi-language support, crucial for a large-scale rollout in a multinational city such as London.