AstraZeneca — Heart Health Application
Designing a life-extending digital companion for cardiac patients with little or no support network
Redesigning a critical financial system for tens of thousands of pension scheme members
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The Problem
After a major cardiac event, a heart attack, bypass surgery, or a heart failure diagnosis, recovery is as much psychological as it is physical. And yet for a significant group of patients, particularly men aged 45 to 65 living alone or with minimal support, the healthcare system largely steps back once they leave hospital.
AstraZeneca commissioned this project to answer a genuinely hard question: how do you design meaningful, ongoing support for people who are resistant to asking for help, wary of anything that feels like surveillance, and navigating a profound change to their sense of self, all through a small screen?
My Role
I led a cross-functional team of seven across UX research, product design, visual design, and content, acting as lead design director throughout. My responsibilities covered the full engagement: shaping the research strategy, facilitating workshops with healthcare professionals and patient groups, directing the design system, and presenting to AstraZeneca's internal stakeholders at key milestones. The completed work was handed over to AZ's internal product team for development.
The Core Challenge
The hardest design problem on this project wasn't functional. It was psychological.
Our research, conducted directly with patients and in close collaboration with cardiologists and psychologists, surfaced a consistent and uncomfortable insight: the men we were designing for had a deep aversion to anything that felt medical, intrusive, or patronising. An app that reminded them too often of their condition risked being switched off entirely. One that didn't engage them meaningfully could miss critical moments.
Everything had to be built around what we came to call "invisible support", intervention that felt like a natural part of daily life, never a clinical imposition. Every notification, check-in prompt, and piece of health content was stress-tested against this principle before it went anywhere near the product.
The Decisions That Mattered
We kept the psychologist in the room through prototyping, not just research. Most projects of this kind consult clinical experts early, then hand the findings to designers. We kept a psychologist embedded in the team all the way through. This directly shaped interaction decisions. The morning check-in flow was redesigned three times based on guidance about how to frame emotional self-assessment without triggering avoidance behaviour in this particular demographic. Having that expertise present in design reviews rather than summarised in a document made a real difference.
We designed two genuinely separate user journeys. Early in discovery it became clear we needed to account for a secondary user: occasional carers, family members, or healthcare professionals who might need some visibility of a patient's wellbeing, without that feeling like surveillance to the patient. Rather than a single experience with a settings toggle, we built two distinct journeys with different permissions, different tone, and different information architecture. The distinction mattered to users.
We resisted the elaborate preference system. The content matrix, determining what information each user received and when, was one of the most complex strategic decisions on the project. We kept onboarding deliberately lightweight, using a short Q&A to set a baseline that adapted quietly over time. The goal was an app that felt like it understood you, without ever asking too much of you upfront.
Outcome
The completed prototype and design system were handed over to AstraZeneca's internal product team, along with full research documentation, design principles, and rationale for key decisions, structured to let their team carry the work forward without losing the intent behind it.
This is one of the most complex research-led projects the studio has undertaken: a rare combination of clinical expertise, behavioural psychology, and product design working together throughout, rather than in a sequence where each discipline hands off to the next and something inevitably gets lost in translation.