From AI-first to patient-first

The challenge

A Dutch digital health scale-up, helping seriously ill patients access treatments in development, had set a goal to help five times more patients online within a year. Their website was the main channel to reach both patients and physicians, but engagement and conversion were low and drop-off was high. They brought me in to find where the funnel was leaking and hand their team UX recommendations.

Listen and envision

I ran a full design, content and functional audit of the experience on desktop and mobile, mapped the patient and physician journeys end to end, and analyzed their analytics to find the key drop-off points. The funnel had room to improve, but the bigger problem sat upstream. The company's entire positioning and content strategy was built around how its AI technology worked. A patient fighting for their life doesn't care how the technology works. They care whether you can help them now.

Design the strategy

I made the case, grounded in their data and shown visually, that the business needed to move from AI-first to patient-first, and took it to the CEO, CTO, CMO and senior team. It went beyond what I had been hired to do, but every improvement to the website depended on getting the positioning right first. The CTO agreed first, openly, in front of his CEO, and the rest of the room followed. I then developed patient and physician personas, and designed and facilitated co-creation workshops that brought business, technology, design and marketing teams together to put the new positioning into practice.

Make it real

• A patient-first site architecture, conversion journeys and messaging hierarchy (who it's for, why it matters, how it works, proof), with web and mobile wireframes their team could build from.

• A content strategy to make the experience human while keeping value propositions and calls to action clear, and a UX guidebook so their teams could carry the approach forward on their own.