Designing for Healthtech: Behavior, AI & Building Trust | Mary Borysova (Amazon)
[Music] Hello everyone and welcome to today’s webinar. Um my name is Sophia. I’m UXL’s community manager and your host for today. This um session is a part of our free webinar series where every single month we bring you industry experts from all around the world to help you level up your UX and product skills. Today we will be talking about how to design for health tech and uh the role in particular behavior design and AI play uh in creating better experiences. So to guide us through the whole thing today we have uh Mary as our guest. She is a product designer at Amazon and she is a health tech specialist with over seven years of uh experience in the field. She’s been uh writing a lot of articles. Maybe you’ve read some of hers already on Medium and um yeah, today she is joining us to share a little bit more about um the topic and her her actual experience in doing that. So uh welcome Mary. Uh thank you for joining us today. How are you doing? Thank you Sophia for your well warm welcome. Um super excited to talk about health tech design. Definitely happy to meet UXL community and share my insights and learnings from all the projects that are done in healthc and all of the interesting top products that I have reviewed in the past. Thank you. We really appreciate you taking the time to join us and I can see already a lot of people um have said hi. Uh so hi everyone who joined us live. Um, you know, this is a live stream, so we’ve saved the last maybe 10, 15 minutes of the session for live Q&A. Um, so this is your chance to ask Mary anything uh that you have about the topic or her experience. Um, feel free to post your questions even throughout um the whole session and we will do our best to cover as much as possible. Uh, yeah. Uh without further ado, uh I know everyone is waiting for for the actual talk. So uh Mary has prepared a presentation for us and she will pop it on the screen in just a second. Okay, here we go. Um Mary, uh feel free to take over. I will be back for the Q&A. All right. All right. I think is all right. So today I’ll be speaking about hack and especially about behavior and AI. Obviously we all know that AI is taking all of the space in our brains these days and we are thinking how to automate processes, how to make the products more efficient, better for the users. But at the same time we should not forget about behavior aspect of it because we still humans and we still react to the same stimuli and triggers in the same way. So in this topic I wanted to bring the two interesting aspects when designing for house tech behavior design and AI and how it can help us create better solutions. Few words about me. So uh my name is Mary. I’m a designer at Amazon but this specific talk will have nothing to do with Amazon. This opinions will be of my own. I’m also founder of House Matters. It is a house tech design studio which I was leading for seven years. I love speaking at podcasts and different events. You can find some free materials just as well as my newsletter and medium uh account with articles about predominantly health tech products and the design. First of all, what is health tech design, right? So on the one hand we understand that it is healthcare enabled by technology. So something that is connecting us with a doctor or clinician um or hospital in a smart way using the technology. The simple way of that would would be to think of COVID times when we did not have an opportunity to actually talk to the clinician directly. So the boom of digital health apps what that we constantly had the chat with doctor via zoom via video via messaging. uh we were able to um communicate our white house symptoms and that’s how healthst was actually growing at that time. Some other interesting examples of health tech apps would be your sports tracking. So everything that is related to health tracking when you are doing sports it would also be considered healthcare because that is something to do with tracking your health and your vitals. Interestingly, we also have obviously innovation within Htech. In this specific case, we are looking at INA. INA, it is a new uh product that was adopt I think it was um finally adopted by the market uh and in this year I guess um the point of the INA is to predict fertility using the saliva. So using the uh beautiful device on the left um woman can um predict if they are fertile on the specific day or not. So all in all health stick is a combination of more traditional and simple ways of interacting with health care services and something more in innovative that helps us make care for our health much more efficient. Uh, EKG monitoring by cardio enables you to monitor uh, your cardio health using the small device that you can use at home, at work, in the office, anywhere really as long as you have this small device and the smartphone and internet. Obviously, we can also think of the applications which are a little bit simpler such as symptom tracking, especially for people who have some disorders. Um, aside from that, Apple Health, which tracks our symptoms automatically using Apple Health devices, Samsung Health, pretty much anything that helps us collect the data from the user and pass it to the system, analyze it in a smart way, and create an insight that will be later used by the user to enable them to make more either better decisions or optimal decisions with the clinician. Right now we see the huge boom for all variables. You can see here there earrings, smart clothing, smart necklaces, bracelets, tattoos, obviously smart rings like aura rings, um belts, smart socks, patches, smart watches, inhalers, glasses, pretty much all the anything that you can imagine that would help you to get the data from the body of the patient or the user, we have already invented it. And right now we are actually finding out more ways how we can collect this precious data from the user for example temperature or blood pressure or uh BPM different metrics maybe even blood sugar. So using the wireless glucose monitor how we can collect this data in an ambient way. So we always know what is happening with the person and we can make um clinically uh grounded decision in terms of what should be done next using this data and not just based on the latest symptoms or maybe just practically what a user or patient in this case can remember because obviously we do not remember everything and having more objective data would help us proceed further much more efficiently with that speaking of the design of hellst apps, you might think well the problems are pretty much the same because hell apps are still working with the human. So the human behavior does not change much whether it is a finan [Music] media we will still see an issue with the retention. So 80% of health apps um see this drop in retention within the 3 months. 80% of users will abandon them. So only 20% of users will stay and it is actually even worse for some categories within house app uh segment. So what do we do with this? Because for example for fitness and nutrition apps we can see only 3% of active users after one month. We practically are using 97% of users. How do we design the applications and products that will help us retain this users and help them change the behavior and see the results? Especially in healthcare that we need to actually pay attention to the design of the product and the ethical side of it because let’s take a simple example. The application might be helping the user to track the medications you need to take on a daily basis or maybe manage the medications get medications in time and 50% of prescribed medications are not taken as directed. Let’s imagine that our application imaginary application helps the users with this problem. And if we lose so many users in the process of them adopting the application, well, we also understand that we are actually not helping these users take the medication in time. So there is also an ethical component and responsibility for um designing the application that will actually help a person feel better, live longer, experience less pain and that is on us. That is our responsibility and privilege to be able to shape such an experience for many people. Um thinking of health and pretention pretty much all of the segments will see exactly the same curve. So the number of days from installation in this case is 30. And we all see that it’s very rare for the application to see more than 10% retention. Which brings us to a question. So why why do people just drop off? Why is it happening? Why do they abandon the app? Obviously the reasons across all applications would be the same. motivation, lack of motivation. At first, I’m interested in using the app. In one month, I just don’t care. I don’t want to use it anymore. I was curious about it. And then in one week, I’m not interested anymore. But with health, we also have a few different unique challenges. First of all, those are habit changes which we’ll focus on today. Health, anxieties, and fears. And these are some some of the aspects that healthcare designers especially designers working on B2C so applications for patients for um end users should keep in mind. Speaking of behavior design as you can imagine all health behaviors need consistency right? So you cannot see the result of your health program in one day one week. It’s impossible. Let’s imagine we are speaking about weight loss programs or maybe even fitness programs. It’s unlikely you will see any result until at least 30 days, in some cases 60 or even 90 days. So this means that we need to design the application so user stays for longer while the behavior is shaping and they are becoming they are making this behavior consistent. they’re becoming almost they’re making this behavior almost a part of their normal life. So um with the problem of delayed gratification meaning that gratification will come in 30 60 90 maybe even one year we need to think of different mechanism how we will be uh engaging the user. Can we give them immediate rewards and in this way we will mitigate the issues related to delayed gratification? How do we design this effective B2C healthcare products? That is a question that we’ll be trying to answer in this conversation and we will start from my favorite BJS folk tiny habits behavior model. Practically we have three as three components of behavior change. We have motivation, ability and prompts. Motivation is quite simple to understand. Let’s take given weight loss as a simple example. I’m motivated to lose my weight because either my doctor told me so or I feel like I want to feel better. I want to look better. uh I want to improve my vitals. Either way, my motivation is quite high at the very beginning. Ability ability is um in this specific case, it’s relatively high because as we all may imagine, it’s not very easy to just cut uh food intake or change my eating habits or workout more. In this specific case, I’m not speaking about um any medications that are taken to u help weight loss, right? So, we are speaking only about behavior change. Prompts. Prompts are um the nudges that I get from the external world to behave accordingly to with my plans. So, based my motivation and ability. And in this case, what we as designers want to keep in mind is that our product should either be in the ideal state. So the user is motivated, the ability is high, so it’s very easy for them to perform the action and the prompt is relevant, is timely, is personalized. So that is the ideal state for our product. Obviously, when the motivation goes down, we need to ensure that the ability is still quite high. But if the motivation is low and the ability is low, it’s very unlikely that prompts will help us succeed. That will not be enough. So, juggling these three components, we can create the effective experience. And let’s now look at the few examples. Uh normally when I pick up my phone, for example, I pick up my phone. I want to log my food intake. I I today was a good day. I had enough energy to make a decision to eat salad instead of burger. I log my food intake as salad. Dopamine increases. I feel happy. And then in sometime dopamine decreases. So um the dopamine reward loop is something that is um normal loop not only for house tech right. So the same idea that we are following in all social media apps. I pick my phone I post something I get my likes or comments my attention dopamine increases I feel happy and sometimes dopamine decreases. So this exact idea is the same that we’ll be looking at in all of the htech apps. One of the uh useful ways how hack apps in this case we are looking at weight watchers is implementing this system of dopamine spikes and um making a user first of all make the making the ability to perform the useful action easy is using the point systems in um in this example. So universal point system. So how this works? Uh weight weightight watchers introduced three types of points. First of all, you have your daily points uh which you can use for let’s say unhealthy foods. So there is some saturated fat or sugar. This points budget is limited. Obviously you can eat unlimited amount of zero point foods which are 100% healthy as Weight Watchers think. uh those will be fruits or vegetables or fish and extra bonus weekly points are given on a weekly basis when you want to indulge into your birthday cake or something else. So this system makes it very easy for me to understand what exactly I need to do. So my ability to perform a useful action is maximum because I just need to keep my budget of points uh within this 29 points a day and not exceed it or maybe exceed it but once a week. And this is significantly easier than just tracking my calories on a daily basis and all the time wondering if I can eat more or maybe I’m already eating more than actually I should be eating. So first of all we are simplifying the system. Secondly we are making it almost like a game. And this at the same time stimulates the dopamine. Every single time I’m logging a foot, I’m receiving a feedback from the system that this specific amount of points is within the norm and I’m c congratulated with this result. Another good example of point systems uh is um the application of that helps us understand if uh the user the patient who is sick usually uh is in exertion zone or not. So heart rate zones are measured using the device hardware device uh almost like a what you can see on the right and based on that a user can see the PS points and quickly understand if they are within the norm or not. So something very very abstract as eat healthy or eat less or eat specific number of calories but not specifically uh clear how many actually I should be eating today. This is brought into a different dimension of making it very simple game like uh when I’m given a small number of points and I can understand my progress within this point system easily almost in one second. Uh speaking of dopamine we’ve mentioned that a user can receive the feedback about the food intake immediately. Zoe health is another good example of this. So a user can see the score of the day. Again a very simple number which uh is a form for formula based number based on the previous food uh intakes for this specific day or for the week and based on the scores of each meal a user has logged. So every single time a user logs a meal, the system, the AI system suggests this smart swaps. So on the one hand, I receive the dopamine spike when I know that I have eaten something nice. I have eaten something healthy and I understand well that this is good for my health. The system says yes, you’re doing great. You’re in green zone. You have earned 80 points. But if for example I have eaten something that is not quite healthy and I say that the color is also signaling me that this is yellow zone or red zone obviously I will not uh get the same dopamine spike and the system in at the same time will nudge me to do better but in a smart way. So it will suggest me what to swap this food to but within the same category. For example, I can add almond butter because this will provide me healthy source of fat within the food that I’ve already chosen. So, how can I help a user that is already in the situation of eating this maybe not the healthiest meal do better? So, it is very timely and it is easy for them to understand how to do better. Uh speaking of timeliness, flow top um period tracking application also uh nudges us with helpful insights and um insights around our previous data around our symptoms that we have logged and our predictions around the future on what could happen next. And at the same time they obviously collecting more data so they can predict your symptoms in the future better and then obviously help you work with the symptoms so you feel healthier. Another good example of this would be Whoop um that has sleep performance, recovery, strain performance uh all of these metrics that are grounded by uh grounded on the goals that we have set at the very beginning. um measurements that are created by the system they are intellectual property of whoop. So they have decided this specific number will be calculated based on for example number of hours you have to sleep and um actual number of hours you manage to sleep and other measurements they might be collecting. Few other interesting ways how we can engage the user to stay with the system long term and not just drop off within one months or one week uh would be streaks and progress bars. Like we’ve already mentioned that practically we need to give the user this boost of dopamine every single time they log something. So they feel this uh positive feeling, pleasure and joy that they are moving in the right direction. they are getting this positive reinforcement from the system and they keep performing the same action but at the same time it is still extremely hard for us to keep doing something for so many days and progress bars help us deal with this issue for example uh both of these applications are health apps we can track our progress visually so every single time I’m finishing my workout or log in healthy foods. I can see how I’m moving towards my goal and I can see have this helicopter view as I’m moving towards my goal. Um, aside from that, I also wanted to mention one important aspect of behavioral design which is community. When we have just uh started off as humans, uh we always received the validation from the community we were part of. If we hunted successfully, the community has rewarded us with better food, better sleeping position, um safer place, um more food, possibly better position within this community. So every single time we have achieved something we have received some validation that we are going in the right direction and the community recognizes us as important part part of the tribe because back then if the community leaves us it’s it was equal to death right so I cannot survive by myself in this wild world just without my family just by myself right so it was extremely important for our survival toy sure that the community recognizes us, accepts us and ideally supports us as we are growing. This has not changed and in Straa um again one of the top health applications for tracking sports um we are again seeing the sports feed. So every time I do sports whether that is biking or canoeing or running I log my activity and I receive feedback from other users just like me again to understand that I’m part of this community. I’m accepted by this community. I’m supported by this community and my input well is valuable. Uh also Straa uses rewards and trophies again as part of this dopamine reinforcement um helping us understand that we are on the right track. For example, I’m in top 1% for running or I can see where I am in the leaderboard. I can compare myself to other users and again if I’m doing well then I can see that I’m in top 10 and that will again reinforce my understanding that I am good enough in this community. I’m accepted by this community and I want to keep going so that some point I will be on top and I will be safe and sound and I will survive. Leader boards across different clubs help us with exactly the same uh problem. understanding that we are safe and uh everything will be fine with us within this community that we are growing. Uh for that also, Straa uses different rewards and trophies. For example, for cycling milestones, however many rides you uh you manage to do or in this case uh we can see the trophy case for each months or trophies released by different clubs. All of these trophies and rewards trigger the same dopamine release. uh the bigger the trophy is obviously the more excited we are and the more uh joy we experience. So more and more this gamification elements help us to bring the user back to the system and to keep them in the system for as long as possible and Straa actually has one of the most impressive retention um rates. I I do not remember the exact rate but it was one of the best in this category. Um aside from that we have different challenges again for the sake of helping the user to go back to the application get this reward and uh grow for example cycling climbing challenge half marathon climbing challenge and so on. So all in all, gamification in health is about designing for small repeated behaviors with triggers and rewards that fit into the user’s life without overwhelming them. All of the examples that we looked into were around and reinforcing the small healthy behaviors and helping the user to change the behavior if it was unhealthy. And as a result, they received either a virtual reward or social approval from the community. Maybe they were moving in in the leaderboard higher. They were getting extra rewards from this community, this club or general users from the application. All in all, they were feeling safer and as our prehistoric brains, we were feeling that we are able to survive in this world. We are accepted by this community and on top of that obviously we are getting this uh positive reinforcements as we are going forward. With that probably you will have a good question. Can gamification harm? All of this is all right. Yeah, definitely we can gify the process. We can help a user understand what is happening with them. We can incentivize them to go ahead and log more healthy actions or healthy food intakes. But can it actually harm? And definitely it can because gamification per se is focused on not intrinsic so not internal motivations of a user but external ones. So, let’s imagine that I’m getting this likes from my club and it’s not so much about me willing to run and run faster or run better. It is so much more about the community just giving me this reinforcement. Or even worse, for example, I’m getting this legs when I’m on my weight loss journey or on any personal journey, health related journey. When I want to be focused on my health, my personal goals related to this health, I might be distracted by the community reinforcement or I might be distracted by this points which actually simplify the system to an extent that might be a little bit too much. So how can we balance this out? There are qualitative and quantitative measurements which we can balance out obviously. So we make the system not onedimensional when we are for example asking a user to log their mental health symptoms but we also poke them to explore more to tell us more what is behind this specific day or emotion or feeling or symptom or anything that we are actually collecting using this app. So it’s not one-dimensional but we are actually understanding the underlining uh feelings around it. So with that being said also AI can be a huge help in this. So we can also think about adaptive coaching based on the goals that this specific user has set on their internal motivations. For example, I want to lose weight so um I look beautiful on my wedding or any any other goal. For example, I want to lose weight or cut my sugar intake so my uh I do not have this glucose spikes. And as a result, this AI coach will help me and will remind me about this specific personal goal that I have. And this will be significantly more first of all important to me to keep myself connected to the goal. Aside from that, it will always bring me back to why I have started. It will help me remember why I am on this journey which is not easy at all. And aside from that, obviously it will help me stay connected to myself, not only to the community, which reinforces my running, which um obviously may give me kudos and likes, comments and other support, which will be useful, but it will be external and not always external is uh the only way that we can get uh this support. Sometimes the only thing that we have is internal push. Adaptive coaching um using AI can also happen as I am running. For example, in this example, you can see keep going ad. So we can use AI voice that will understand that we are struggling in this specific moment. We are not running as well. and this AI coach will remind us again about our goals or maybe just will support us as a human. So with that I understand that not all of us are health tech designers or designing in healthcare but the quote that I like is to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived this is to have succeeded and even if we are not designing for healthcare we can still design experience that will help a human a person breathe easier have a better life and this is our responsibility and our privilege to have this chance to affect somebody. Thank you very much. No, that was me. Sorry. Uh thank you Mary for for the presentation. Um, now it’s time for the Q&A. So, if you have any questions about health tech design or what you’ve just heard Mary share with us, uh, feel free to post it. And actually, we already have a few, uh, that I would love to bring up on screen if you are ready. Uh, but, um, we had, uh, a question about the source of the data figures. Uh I’m also interested in that. So if you have any that are uh available right now, share with us. If not, I can also share the sources in the follow-up email. Yeah, definitely. These are public research studies that were conducted. You can easily find the sources for most of these numbers. Uh I can also share them definitely. Thank you. Uh and another from Devish is um aren’t coupons better than just points or are we talking about converting them to this only? So it was related to uh one part of the presentation but in general we you were talking about uh the point system and the reward system. So in that case would you go for coupons to motivate them or points? What would you say is better? I believe we have to define what the coupon means in this case because coupon is definitely something that in my again possibly I’m misunderstanding this uh but for me that would be something that would redeem me percentage some discount right or maybe extra gift in our case it is an instrument how I can measure something very abstract which in my case is health behavior and shape it into something that is very easily quantifiable and accessible. by everybody. So we are all on the same page. We are all using the same terms, the same numbers, the same metric system and we cannot really deviate from it too much. Uh with that being said, yes, coupons or any other system, it is just a numeric system how we can measure health input, health behavior and then go go ahead with it. Thank you. It makes sense. So hopefully this this answers your question. Um, another fun one is that is there a way to avoid uh people fooling the system meaning avoid the people that say uh to the system they did something good even if they didn’t? Well uh first of all we we have to go back to the question why do we want to do this? Um because by and large if a user wants to cheat the system that is still on their side whether they are cheating the system or not our responsibility is to reinforce the positive action to motivate the positive action. If a user wants to cheat they will cheat. If we introduce extra policies or not they can still cheat. It’s impossible not to right. So um I would shift the perspective from ensuring that the users do not cheat to how can we motivate them not to cheat but to be interested in intrinsic like I mentioned earlier internal motivations. So they would be interested in pursuing their own goal rather than getting something from the system that would be a bonus point or like or something else because again we know so many examples when users were not running but putting something on a treadmill, right? So there are definitely many ways how you can change the system but how you as a designer can motivate a user to actually run and not just get the bonus points because that goes back to this harm versus benefit side that I mentioned. We need to focus on the why we have started reinforcing this behavior not the fact that these bonus points which are virtual abstract and non-existent really uh they are just instruments for us to empower user to do an effective action not more than that. So in a nutshell, if a user wants to cheat the system, they will cheat the system. But we should find ways to encourage them to actually do the thing that’s good for them, right? Yes. So remind them why they have decided to actually pursue this behavior change as much as possible and help them stay on track within that. Okay. Thank you. And I hopefully this uh answers your question. Thank you for the question. Uh we have one very loaded uh question that I just need to process if uh if it’s something we can do. Okay, let’s maybe answer the first one. Uh so how can we know the regulations, compliances and accessibility that must be followed for different countries? Yes, first of all for freelance I would say I have always worked with clinical boards with legal boards and in this case you cannot know all of the regulations licensing compliances and all the other legal aspects even more you should not as a designer your responsibility is to design the product if there are certain requirements within the regulations s compliances, privacy policies, they should be communicated to the designer by product person or somebody who is working on that side of of the product equation, right? So our responsibility as designers is to help the user achieve the action. Obviously the business as well, but we cannot know there’s regulations and we should not. Speaking of accessibility, yes, you should study the accessibility standards for different groups of people, especially if you’re working with uh seniors, uh with kids, uh with people with disabilities, mental health issues. There are many accessibility standards that are not conventional and you should dive into that if you know that your target segment is experiencing some limitations or might especially if you are designing for large groups of people certainly you have to dive into that and ensure that it is accessible but that is a huge separate topic in itself. Uh thank you thank you Mary and thank you Sam. Um we still have some time. So this is again a big big question I guess. Uh but um perhaps we can point it to point the user to the point of viewer to maybe one or two strategies um that can help improve user retention in B2B health tech applications. That’s a great question because we have not touched B2B hellst applications in this conversation at all. If you’re speaking about B2B, I will probably um give a short intro of what B2B might look like in helltech. Uh we might be selling our solution to the hospital. So the doctor who is using um medical record software to manage the patients or maybe it is a doctor who uses our software to analyze uh the records of a patient. You can do anything right. So sher that or it might be selling the software to the lab to analyze a lot of data and process it. So there are many many different cases. Uh I’m not entirely sure if user retention is um as simple to answer within such a small um amount of time because that is very very different than what we have been exploring in the last hour. uh for user retention here that would be in in a nutshell first of all doctor satisfaction and efficiency of the solution within the current uh clinical workflows meaning that how much our solution actually uh speeds up the process at the same time following the clinical guidelines and giving the doctor the maximum that they need within the shortest amount of time possible. But that is again just one of the examples of B2B health tech. can be much more than just working with doctor helping them optimize their workflows. Thank you, Mary. Makes sense. Um, let me see what else we have some time left. So, um, a little bit different, but, um, Patricia says that, uh, if you’re a US junior designer hoping to work in health tech, how would you specialize in learning about health tech, is there a specific qualification needed? That’s a great question because uh, it largely depends on where exactly you live. So, which country? Um I would say if you live in the US you’re very lucky if you want to work in house um most of the house tech companies that I know of they are based in the US. If you work in um or live in European Union situation is very different. There are not as many companies primarily because the market is not private but state. Um in the UK situation is a little bit better. Yes, we have some private companies, many more than in European Union. Uh but still not as great as in the US. So if you work in the US, technically you have exposure to many HIC opportunities, many jobs within HC for junior, middle, senior designers. And answering your question, uh if you hope to work in this industry, I would definitely start working and copying and understanding how the top applications work. Because health tech is very unique field, you might need to know something specific about it. If the company is interested in a person passionate about health tech, sometimes it is not the case. You’re just looking for senior product designer who can also work in hellte. But if you are not, then it would be definitely beneficial for you to create a portfolio around healthcare cases and specific qualifications in healthc design. There are some courses um but all in all I would definitely say just learn uh using the free resources learn how applications actually work because product design is changing very quickly and I’m not entirely sure that this uh qualification certifications and other courses from universities will actually help you get the skills and knowledge that you will be able to apply so soon because as of now that would be the combination of AI still and helltech knowledge. And yes, if you remove hellte or AI, you will be lagging. And unfortunately, not many courses will help you with both helltech and AI. So you will have to do it by yourself. Um yeah so speaking of if you are hoping to work in helltech how would you specialize in learning part of question uh I would focus on htech apps portfolio case studies of other designers who have developed this apps how exactly they were thinking and creating your applications if you can from scratch to introduce to the committee. Thank you. And uh for the last question for today uh from Jamie, we are speaking a lot to user motivation which can be a short-term endeavor since being motivated is hard to maintain. Uh how can we possibly keep a user’s inspiration to help them? Right. Yeah. So um I would say probably half of my talk was focused on user motivation and different strategies to um help a user be motivated not just short term and uh speaking of motivation long-term definitely that is uh like I mentioned earlier that is definitely some gamification mechanics like streaks um possibly streaks and rewards that can be received on a weekly basis, monthly basis. Uh also if we dive into gamification, there may be grades that a user is following as we are progressing ahead. That’s one week, two weeks, three weeks and so on, right? So think of this a little bit more like a game when we level up each time we are progressing within our health tech journey, healthcare journey. So if I’m losing more weight or if I’m eating healthier and healthier, obviously I’m progressing. But nobody says that when I start winning in my game, I stop playing. I don’t. That’s exactly why I’m playing again and again and again and again and more. And each time the monster is bigger, but I’m I’m more excited to to face this monster. Same with health. We start with small habits, small steps and gradually as a user progresses we we make the monster bigger because previous challenges were not as big, right? So we can now actually face a bigger monster and as shortterm comes to become long-term, we can actually inspire the user much much better than with one small tiny action and one small dopamine high spike. Um, thank you. Thank you, Mary. Jamie said keep it in front of them is what I meant. Sorry. But I think your question nonetheless, I mean your answer nonetheless um answers their question that it is a gradual thing and that you start small with gamification and then you keep the user motivated long time long term. Um but yeah with that uh we are almost out of time. So I would uh love to thank you for joining us today. It was really great to have you on and to hear more about your experience but also uh some really great techniques and strategies you shared. Um thank you everyone who stayed on until the very end. Uh we will be sending you the recording and the resources uh in the follow-up email. Uh if you have some time, we would really appreciate your feedback. It will help us and Mary do better. And uh if you want to keep this conversation going, uh join us in UXL’s open free community. Uh that’s discord.gg/uxl. Um, and yes, Mary, uh, thank you once again. Huge thanks from the whole UXL team. Is there anything else you would like to say to everyone before we go off? Yeah, absolutely. Thank you very much for your time, guys. I really appreciate your interest in health tech because we need more designers who will be designing better products that will help people change their behavior and actually feel healthy and live longer and hopefully become much much happier and live with less pain or no pain at all. So, um yeah, I’m happy to help you. Please connect with me on LinkedIn. Also, I have free resources on my Medium or on my Substack. Feel free to follow those. And yeah, let’s stay connected and um yeah, good luck with pursuing your goals within health tech. Thank you. Uh you will have all of Mary’s links in the follow-up email, so please keep an eye out on that. And until next time, keep on learning, stay curious, and see you. Bye-bye.
Designing for health goes way beyond about usability. It’s about building trust, influencing behavior, and shaping decisions that affect lives. In this session, Mary Borysova, Product Designer at Amazon and healthtech specialist, shares her approach to creating impactful health experiences using behavioral design principles and AI.
You’ll get insights from real-world projects like Strava, Zoe, and CVS Health, and learn how to navigate the emotional, ethical, and functional complexity of the healthtech space.
Key Insights:
– What makes healthtech design different from other verticals
– How behavior design influences health outcomes and user engagement
– Real use cases for AI in personalized health experiences
– The biggest challenges in building ethical and effective healthcare products
Chapters:
Featured Speaker:
Mary Borysova: Product Designer at Amazon, with 12+ years in product design and 7 years focused on healthcare. She’s worked with Strava, CVS Health, PandaDoc, and Zoe, and her writing on behavior design has been read by over 100,000 people on Medium.
Resources:
– Upskill in UX, product, and AI at https://uxcel.com/
– Uxcel helps product and design teams upskill faster through interactive, gamified learning. From UX and product management to AI, Uxcel makes role-based learning effective and scalable.
– Upcoming events: https://lu.ma/uxcel
– Connect with 6,500+ professionals in our open free community: https://discord.gg/uxcel
Who Should Watch This Video:
– UX/UI designers and product professionals working in health, wellness, or fitness
– Teams building healthtech products with AI and behavior-driven features
– Designers and researchers exploring career transitions into healthcare
Related Videos:
▶️ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QIg3_AWTpA
▶️ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvrzxV-BhbM
▶️ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nr7G7fYYBEk&t=68s
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DISCLAIMER: This recording is from a live webinar hosted by Uxcel. For more learning resources, visit: https://uxcel.com
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