Designing for Trust: Building a Patient-Centered Digital Health Experience at knownwell
knownwell is a mission driven obesity medicine company delivering in-person and virtual care. We built a patient-facing digital experience from the ground up for an audience that had frequently been dismissed, ignored, or actively shamed by the healthcare system.
My role: Director of Design, leading all patient-facing product design across web and native mobile (iOS and Android), product strategy, and user research.
The product challenge wasn't just usability. It was patient trust. And that trust had to be built into every layer of the product: interaction design, visual design, UX copy, and research practice.
Trust is built throughout the experience by following a strategic framework:
• Consistency: Every touchpoint — visual, verbal, functional — reinforced the same message to the patient: you belong here.
• Empathy: Designing for the emotional state of the user, not just their task state.
Agency: Giving users control to choose, decide and move at their own pace
Registration: The First Click as a Trust Signal
Challenge: Traditional healthcare registration flows are long, clinical, and anxiety-inducing. For our patient population, this was often the first digital interaction with any healthcare brand after years of negative experiences.
Strategy: Redesigned the entire registration experience around one principle — the first click should be the first step of feeling seen. Digital registration allows patients to easily start their care at knownwell while also gathering the personal information necessary for their clinical care. Information not needed to complete first visit registration, such as the full patient medical chart and medication list is gathered primarily through tools and automations prior to the first visit.
Key decisions:
• Simplified the experience to collect only the personal information needed to get a patient booked for their first visit.
• Built in real-time insurance eligibility checks and insurance card capture so patients know their care is covered before they arrive.
• Moved visit slot selection into the middle of the flow, so patients book a specific visit with a specific clinician before encountering any paperwork. This reframed the emotional arc: you're securing your care, then completing the details.
• Added clinician photos to booking to build emotional connection before the first visit.
Results:17,000+ patients booked through the redesigned flow
Average registration time: 13 minutes
No-show rate: 4.3% (well below industry benchmarks)
Patient App: Agency as a Product Feature
Challenge: Build a patient experience that gives them meaningful control over their care — across scheduling, communication, clinical data, and engagement — while maintaining the warmth of an in-person visit.
Strategy: Launched a native iOS, Android, and web app in April 2025 with agency as the core design goal. Every feature balances patient control of their care with clinical guidelines and workflows.
knownwell patient app is custom built experience for our patient population that is integrated with athenahealth EHR tool on the back end. This allows clinical team members to only interact within the EHR, while patients have an experience tailored to their needs at knownwell.
knownwell patient app is custom built experience for our patient population that is integrated with athenahealth EHR tool on the back end. This allows clinical team members to only interact within the EHR, while patients have an experience tailored to their needs at knownwell.
Key decisions:
• Designed customizable vitals views where patients can choose to hide weight and BMI in their chart, recognizing that these metrics are psychologically loaded for our population.
• Designed secure clinician messaging, upcoming visit management, and progress tracking as a cohesive experience that mirrors the welcome of knownwell's physical clinics.
Results:80–90% app adoption among patients seen in the last 30 days, with some markets exceeding 90%
~23,000 sessions per month
14 page views per session
Self-Scheduling Drives Care Plan Adherence
Challenge: Build a scheduling structure that can support multiple visit types over time, allowing patients to book with their desired clinician and format (virtual or in-person).
Strategy: Reduce inbound phone calls from patients for scheduling, freeing up lines for clinical urgent care. Allow patients the convenience of scheduling from the patient app in order to drive visit cadence adherence which has been shown to improve health outcomes.
Flexible UX structure allows for 2 paths for scheduling:
1. Patients schedule specific visit types within a time frame suggested by their clinicians in order to adhere to desired visit cadence to support health outcomes. For example, patients on a GLP-1 are recommended to have a visit every month for the first 6 months.
2. "Choose your own adventure" visit type selection gives patients control over the kind of care they seek, not just the time slots. This encourages patients to book new types of care with knownwell including Dietitian visits.
7,800 follow-up visits self-scheduled through the app
3,500 visits rescheduled in-app
Trust and AI: Designing for a New Trust Relationship
Challenge: As knownwell began building Kara, an AI care agent integrated into the patient app, the trust framework was applied to an entirely new category of product challenge.
The core design problem: When a patient gets a message from a care team member, they have a clear mental model. When an AI agent responds to a clinical question, that model breaks down — and for patients who already arrived with distrust, an opaque AI interaction can feel like exactly the kind of dismissal they've experienced before.
Key design decisions:
• Transparency without anxiety: Designed the AI disclosure to feel welcoming rather than alarming. "I'm Kara, your AI care guide" versus "you're talking to an agent" communicates whose side the technology is on.
• Voice consistency: Required Kara's tone to match knownwell's brand voice — conversational, empowering, stigma-free to create a consistency between the human experience and the AI experience.
• Human handoff design: Defined the criteria and interaction patterns for when Kara recognizes the need to escalate to a human clinician, making the handoff feel seamless and caring, not like the AI gave up.
Results: Kara is planned to launch Summer 2026