Redesigning a platform from the ground up for all Huddle Up* patients and their families, while simultaneously developing a corporate-wide design system and internal guidelines for our Product, Clinical, and Sales teams.
*Huddle Up, formerly known as DotCom Therapy — yes, we managed to accomplish all of this while executing a full rebrand too.
Background
The original patient experience platform, Zesh, was meant to help patients and their families easily manage sessions, track progress, and access recommended resources. While functional, Zesh struggled with low conversion rates and an inconsistent user experience. Recognizing these challenges, the company made enhancing the patient and family experience its top priority.
For the product team, the opportunity to reimagine Zesh was exciting. For me, it was an incredible opportunity to lead with a user-centered approach. We all understood this was going to be a heavy lift — but one that promised to deliver meaningful value and impact.
The original onboarding screens, highlighting some of its shortfalls:
Approach
We faced several challenges, but I’ll highlight the two most significant ones here:
One, was satisfying various stakeholders across the company — our clients, clinicians, Marketing, and of course, the patients and their families. To tackle this, we started by creating a design system from scratch and adopting the most appropriate component library, enabling us to work quickly, be flexible, and experiment and test with multiple variations.
Once the vision for Zesh’s transformation was clear, the next challenge was restructuring the legacy data to align with the new design and ensure scalability. This required close collaboration with core team leads from Clinical, Sales, and Marketing to define our key data needs and identify opportunities for analysis. Together, we reorganized the data structure into a hierarchical and modular system, enabling us to generate reports quickly and efficiently — without relying on custom engineering work.
Ultimately, the updates were centered on earning the trust of our patients and their families. The new design enabled us to capture and store essential data, personalizing and enhancing each user’s experience. Paired with a refined onboarding process, the result is a platform that feels more relevant, timely, and visually compelling.
Video walk-through of the new experience (some steps in the flow were removed to protect the company’s privacy):
Snapshot of the new design systems:
Impact
To evaluate how the new design impacted our core metrics after launch, we implemented Mixpanel. The results revealed a significant increase in the platform's account creation conversion rate. It’s worth mentioning that these results were also influenced by collaboration with marketing efforts.
