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
The Problem
Following a major cardiac event — a heart attack, bypass surgery, or heart failure diagnosis — the period of recovery is as much psychological as it is physical. Yet for a significant group of patients, particularly men aged 45–65 living alone or with minimal support, the healthcare system largely steps back once they leave hospital.
AstraZeneca commissioned this project to answer a difficult question: how do you design meaningful, ongoing support for people who are resistant to asking for help, wary of feeling surveilled, and navigating a profound change to their sense of self — all through a small screen?
My Role
I led a cross-functional team of 7 across UX research, product design, visual design, and content — acting as the lead design director throughout. My responsibilities spanned 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 work was eventually handed over to AZ's internal product team for development.
The Core Challenge
The hardest design problem here wasn't functional — it was psychological.
Our research, conducted directly with patients and in close collaboration with cardiologists and psychologists, surfaced a consistent and sobering 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 abandoned entirely. One that didn't engage them enough could miss critical moments.
The entire design had to be built around what we came to call an "invisible support" principle — 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 made it into the product.
Key Decisions
Bringing psychologists into the design process, not just the research phase. Most projects of this type consult clinical experts early then hand the findings to designers. We kept a psychologist embedded in the team through prototyping. This directly shaped interaction decisions — the morning check-in flow, for example, was redesigned three times based on guidance about how to frame emotional self-assessment without triggering avoidance behaviour in this demographic.
Designing two parallel user journeys. Early in discovery it became clear we needed to account for a secondary user — occasional carers, family members, or HCPs who might need visibility of a patient's wellbeing without that feeling like surveillance to the patient. We designed these as genuinely distinct journeys with different permissions, tone, and information architecture rather than a single experience with a settings toggle.
Personalisation through simplicity. The content matrix — determining what information each user received and when — was one of the most complex strategic decisions of the project. We resisted the temptation to build an elaborate preference system, instead using a lightweight onboarding 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.
Outcome
The completed prototype and design system were handed over to AstraZeneca's internal product team, along with full documentation of the research findings, design principles, and rationale for key decisions — structured specifically to enable their team to carry the work forward without losing intent.
This project represents one of the most complex research-led engagements in the studio's portfolio: a rare combination of clinical expertise, behavioural psychology, and product design working in genuine collaboration, rather than in sequence.