Looking to understand the role of instant noodles in middle-class Chinese life, the IDEO team conducted in-home research with consumers across a range of life stages and levels of attachment to noodle culture and convenience foods. The first finding was reassuring: Everyone kept instant noodles at home. The category still had a place in middle-class kitchens. But beneath that was a more complicated, emotional story—and an unmet need for convenience and quality to coexist in a single product.

The team discovered that instant noodles are more than just a quick, on-the-go meal; they are a nostalgic comfort food that evokes fond memories. But since their heyday, their role in daily life has evolved. Once a complete meal in itself, instant noodles now often function as a versatile flavor base or culinary accent in other dishes. Because they don’t align with the healthier, higher-quality, and more novel food choices that middle-class consumers aspire to, noodle shops, delivery noodles, or fresh-cooked instant options often win out. Yet, even these alternatives come with trade-offs. Delivered noodles lose texture during transport. Sit-down noodle shops preserve quality but offer limited flavors.  Cooking from scratch meets the bar for both texture and flavor, but requires a significant time investment. As one young mother said, “If I could get the texture of fresh-cooked noodles without turning on the stove, I’d buy that instant noodle for sure.”

The research inspired the creation of a new category, which the team termed “fresh-brewed noodles.” More than just a noodle or broth upgrade, Master Kong’s fresh-brewed noodles would offer the speed of instant noodles with the quality of freshly cooked options, plus flavors not found in traditional noodle shops. The strategic positioning was clear. Executing it by making fresh-brewed noodles mass-producible, affordable, and eventually profitable presented a category-innovation challenge. To get there, IDEO designed a series of dual-track co-creation workshops with the Master Kong team and consumers.

One track focused on prototyping the core product experience: noodles, broth, and toppings. IDEO and Master Kong’s R&D team began by studying the traditional craft of Chinese noodle-making, starting in Shanxi, a region renowned for its noodles. Through successive rounds of prototyping and consumer tasting, the team identified a critical insight: for “fresh-brewed noodles” to be convincing, the innovation had to be centered on the noodles themselves.

Texture alone was not enough. Consumers needed to see a meaningful difference before they tasted the product. IDEO translated this insight into a distinctive noodle profile: irregular, dimensional shapes designed to remain springy, hold sauce and broth, and mimic the resilience of freshly cooked noodles using only hot water. Because this visible shape represented the product’s core value proposition, it became a hero feature on the packaging. The graphic design made a bold visual statement about the noodle form, turning a technical R&D breakthrough into an immediately legible consumer promise: these are not ordinary instant noodles.

A parallel track explored the broader commercial experience: trend-forward and reimagined classic flavor profiles, light yet deeply satisfying broths, carefully selected toppings, and packaging that signals a new level of quality on store shelves. One key insight was that utensils carry meaning. Conventional instant noodles are often associated with disposable plastic forks, while higher-quality noodles are eaten with chopsticks. IDEO translated this cultural cue into the design of the bowl’s lid.

Instead of treating utensils as an afterthought, the team designed a solid, rounded, heat-retaining lid that embeds a pair of small wooden chopsticks. The gesture creates a small ritual of anticipation and reframes the product—not just a convenient instant meal, but a more considered noodle experience. Once opened, the product fulfills that promise with satisfyingly bouncy noodles, a rich liquid broth pouch that replaces the traditional oil-and-powder packet, and a vegetable packet reformulated with more premium whole ingredients.

The first batch of “Te Bie Te” Fresh-Brewed Noodles—Chinese wordplay that emphasizes “special”—launched in August 2025 with three trendy and tried-and-true flavors. Within just three days, sales exceeded 100,000 bowls. Within a week, “Te Bie Te” topped the instant noodle category sales ranking on Douyin, China’s domestic counterpart to TikTok. The outcome was bigger than a product launch—it served as proof that a mature, declining category could be fundamentally reinvented to meet consumers’ real needs. For Master Kong, the project became a North Star and a model for internal category innovation in beverages, ready-to-eat foods, and beyond.

Once a popular, affordable staple, the instant noodle category in China has been declining rapidly due to shifting demographics, rising food delivery options, and increasing customer demand for healthier, more nutritious meals.

‍

According to the World Instant Noodles Association, between 2020 and 2023, China’s instant noodle consumption fell by 4 billion packs.

100,000+

“Te Bie Te” bowls sold in the first 3 days on the market

#1

on Douyin’s instant noodle category ranking within one week of launch

Taylor’s legacy began in 1969 with the founding of Taylor’s College and soon expanded to include Taylor’s University, one of Southeast Asia’s top private universities, as well as many other institutions that serve 35,000 students per year. The family-owned group also operates Taylor’s International Schools, Garden International School, and Nexus International School for students ages 4 to 18. In Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital city, annual tuition at premium private schools like these ranges from about $10,000 to $25,000 USD. Taylor’s wanted to do something different: provide the same level of academic rigor and immersive learning experiences at one-third the cost.

IDEO began by speaking with over three dozen students, parents, teachers, and experts across the capital to understand what was working, what wasn’t, and what was missing from such moderately priced international schools.

A few themes quickly emerged. Families, students, and teachers were worried about the stability of these new private schools, which tended to have higher-than-normal teacher turnover rates and were plagued by financial instability, negatively impacting talent attraction and retention, as well as student learning. Parents appreciated that the schools offered holistic learning experiences, such as field trips to rural areas, including jungles, but wished they were more consistently part of the curriculum. And now, the looming challenge of AI—how to use it, how to teach it, and how to teach with it—was in the background, a persistent cause for concern. The big unmet need? Reassurance that Taylor’s was thinking long-term and systematically about developing the skills, knowledge, and mindsets that would prepare students for an ever-changing world. Parents wanted a school that measured growth in academic, social, and character terms over generations, not just school semesters.

With these insights in hand, IDEO began developing a design Playbook for Taylor’s new brand—Lexel International Schools. A combination of “lexicon” and “excellence,” Lexel’s mission is “building what lasts, learning for life.”

The schools are centered around three key differentiators: 

• Always Ahead: Lexel schools commit to staying current with the topics and subject matter they teach, as well as the tools they provide to students, parents, and teachers.s.  
  ‍
• Learning That Builds for Life: The schools ensure programmatic, systemic, and consistent learning experiences from Pre-K to Year 11. Interested students can even continue their post-secondary journey in partnership with Taylor’s University and other higher education institutions within the Taylor’s ecosystem.
  
  
• Educators for the Long Run: These schools commit to ongoing investments in professional growth opportunities for teachers and stable learning environments for students.

Four Lexel Literacies—AI, Digital, Financial, and Nutrition—integrated into the Cambridge Curriculum bring the school’s vision and mission to life.

By systematically integrating AI literacy into its spiral education framework, in particular, an approach where major topics are revisited multiple times through a curriculum to build fluency over time, Lexel ensures parents that the school is thinking a decade ahead from Day One, setting the school apart. In addition to enhancing AI fluency, Lexel offers unique end-of-term experiences called Jungles & Junctions.

Combining three important strands of learning—community engagement, nature-based personal and interpersonal development, and career and university exploration—Jungles & Junctions leverages Taylor’s extended educational network and Lexel’s strategic founding campus within the Gamuda Gardens development in Selangor. Surrounded by tropical rainforests, the township’s residential neighborhoods, theme park, and various sports facilities, including an Olympic-length swimming pool, are transformed into an extended Lexel campus, with a GenAI-driven planner to help teachers streamline the organization of class outings. “The Township is Your Campus” became the tagline for this approach.

In September 2025, just months after IDEO’s collaboration ended, Taylor’s began classes at its first Lexel International School. By mid-year, the new school had achieved 115% of its year-one student enrollment target, with significant inbound demand for Year 2 already demonstrating the school’s market resonance.

The modern campus features spacious classrooms, science and technology labs, a library, a multipurpose hall, and a canteen. Annual tuition ranges from about $2,800 USD for pre-K students to about $6,100 USD for secondary students.

Most importantly, by combining Taylor’s deep academic expertise, Gamuda Land’s development prowess, and IDEO’s innovative design Playbook, Lexel brings quality, affordable international education closer to home for Malaysian families. According to one parent, “My daughter looks forward to going to school every day … and has a lot of opportunities to express herself. On a scale of 1 to 10, I give [Lexel] an 11.” Based on the IDEO Playbook, a second flagship campus in the Southern Klang Valley, which is scheduled to open in September 2026, has already exceeded its year-one target enrollment expectations, with plans to continue extending the Lexel network to other parts of Malaysia and the wider Southeast Asian region in the near future.

Malaysia’s private international school sector has grown significantly as parents seek quality English-language education. However, high tuition fees and limited access to reputable schools are continual challenges for those in the emerging middle class.

115%

of Lexel’s student enrollment target reached during the launch year of its first campus
‍

Year 1 enrollment target exceeded

at Lexel's second campus several months ahead of classes commencing

‍

The American news industry has long been a competitive and saturated market. This has only intensified with the emergence of social media outlets and AI-generated news. Even so, SAN’s rigorously unbiased, fact-based reporting style and rich video storytelling had enabled the ambitious startup to rise above the media fray in just three short years.

With a strong foundation to build on, IDEO sought to further differentiate SAN’s cutting-edge news product and build deeper engagement with a wider audience through a new user experience.

‍Collaborating closely, IDEO and SAN began by delving deeply into media consumption habits. They met with early SAN superfans, news consumers who spent hours a day absorbing content from traditional outlets like Fox and USA Today, and those who looked to their Ring doorbell app or Reddit for news. The takeaways? People were tired of clickbait and clunky interfaces. They sought clear, factual news that was easily accessible, with additional context to help them interpret events and understand their significance. They craved more than one perspective on important topics, so stories felt balanced rather than polarized. They also valued having control over how they consumed news, so making it easy to switch between text, video, and audio formats was crucial.

Together, IDEO and SAN created features across SAN’s website and app that put facts, trust, and transparency at the core of the product experience. Fact Cards distill key data points into clear, shareable units, while the Sources feature allows readers to trace information directly back to its original source. To make complex stories easier to grasp, Big Picture insights drill down into why events matter, surfacing underlying themes, historical parallels, differences in reporting, and common ground. The Why This Story Matters section provides readers with clear framing and sets the story within a broader context, while the Timeline illustrates how events unfold over days, months, or even years. An antidote to news polarization, See All Sides presents left, right, and center narratives for key topics side-by-side, and Media Landscape visualizations reveal how coverage varies across outlets. Finally, to ensure SAN fits seamlessly into readers’ daily lives, the redesigned Today Page is organized into three highly scannable sections: Latest News, Top Stories, and SAN Originals. The combined features create a balanced, clear, and non-polarizing news experience, making it easy for readers to delve deeper into the sources of their news.

SAN now delivers a news experience as modern, dynamic, and trustworthy as its journalism. A month after its debut, the SAN app’s page views increased 1,170 percent year over year compared to June 2024, while active users rose 700 percent. Readers also give the updated mobile experience a 4.8 rating on the Apple App Store. “Our team is delivering reporting that’s both deeply factual and accessible,” said Derek Mead, SAN’s Chief Content Officer. “This redesign is pivotal to the direction journalism needs to take and the leadership role Straight Arrow News is taking on as we help guide the news industry into a brighter future.”

SAN built a loyal readership and gained recognition for its unbiased reporting. To expand and stand out from legacy media, SAN  wanted a redesigned user experience that reflected its commitment to fact-based journalism.

1,170%

increase in app page views YoY 

700%

increase in active users

4.8 rating

on the Apple App Store

Sanofi was the first company to supply the polio vaccine worldwide. Because of the global fight against the disease, endemic wild poliovirus transmission is now limited to just two countries. However, attitudes toward vaccines and immunizations have shifted significantly. To ensure a smooth launch of Beyfortus in a time of increased vaccine hesitancy, Sanofi asked IDEO to conduct research across four important and very different healthcare markets: Germany, Spain, China, and the US.

IDEO worked with parents, caregivers, healthcare professionals, and healthcare administrators to identify potential barriers to vaccine adoption and understand the emotional needs of all stakeholders involved in the immunization process. Navigating cultural differences and diverse healthcare environments, the team uncovered a set of insights.

For healthcare professionals, the team discovered there was no one-size-fits-all approach to immunization training across Sanofi’s 20-plus global markets. While consistency of key information was important, trainings needed to be flexible and customizable. This way, regardless of whether the vaccine was administered by midwives, OB-GYNs, nurses, or doctors, they could  confidently discuss the pros and cons across cultural contexts and administer the drug correctly.
‍
For new parents, receiving information about a new immunization immediately after giving birth could be too stressful. But simply leaving pamphlets about Beyfortus in waiting rooms didn't address their real concerns, either. Caregivers needed to engage in conversations earlier in their pregnancies and continue them after leaving the hospital, when they might have additional questions.

IDEO translated these research insights into a highly accessible global communication toolkit that uses simple, straightforward language, metaphors, and illustrations to support informed conversations between healthcare providers and parents before, during, and after a child is born. IDEO then conducted a series of market-fit co-design workshops with representatives of Sanofi’s global immunization business to iterate on the print and digital tools, make them more resonant with regional customers, and ensure compliance with local regulations. IDEO handed the toolkits over for development to support the launch of Beyfortus in January 2024, just in time for RSV season.

Beyfortus saw enormous demand in its first year, demonstrating strong efficacy in real-world applications and achieving blockbuster status as a $1.8 billion therapy. Sanofi’s global launch team credits the patient-centric toolkit with increased requests for communication materials from its regional markets as well as from healthcare and government organizations that have typically been hard to reach, key goals of its global-local launch strategy.

Since its development, Beyfortus has received swift regulatory approval from the US, EU, China, and Japan, with patient demand causing Sanofi to triple its worldwide manufacturing capacity to meet the needs of the 2024-25 RSV season. Ahead of the larger global distribution of Beyfortus, IDEO and Sanofi partnered with equity expert consultants, Fearless Futures, to conduct a DEI review and worked with doctors and nurses who participated in the initial drug launch to make the materials even more accessible, relevant, and successful for 2025 and beyond. To date, six million babies—and counting—have been immunized with Beyfortus.

Worldwide, childhood vaccination hesitancy among parents fluctuates between 25-45%, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), a trend it considers one of the biggest global threats to public health.

85.9%

‍reduction in hospitalizations for infants who received Beyfortus compared to those who did not (2023–24 RSV season)

$1.8B

in first-year sales of Beyfortus

‍

For leading fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies, one way to escape the echo chamber is to adopt a human-centered approach—to actively listen to consumers and reconnect with the realities of their lives. It’s about more than bringing them in at a certain stage of the project. Their needs have to be considered from the very beginning. 

What follows is a story from IDEO Shanghai about what happens when a prominent consumer company returns to its customer-centric roots and discovers new growth in one of its most established categories.

What happens after a company hits the category ceiling?

China’s FMCG sector is known for its intensity. Even the most established companies cannot afford to relax; the competition is genuinely fierce.

In China’s major metropolitan cities and regional hubs, competitors launch new products at a rapid pace, all in pursuit of increasingly diverse consumer needs. Beyond these cities, smaller and lesser-known brands are making moves, constantly experimenting, and fighting hard for consumer attention through social media platforms.

Before coming to IDEO, our client had already made significant investments in consumer research to maintain its competitive edge. After the project started, its leaders showed us an elaborate chart filled with rows of consumer identity tags, behavioral patterns, and usage preferences, all organized by data dimensions and densely packed across different quadrants. Years of accumulated consumer insights had informed their product development and marketing strategies, helping them achieve significant commercial success.

And yet, despite all these efforts, they seemed to have hit a wall. To spur new growth in one of their flagship categories, for example, they had tried various strategies, such as conducting research in smaller cities, launching new products aligned with mass-market trends, and attempting to keep consumers engaged by offering more choices. None of it was enough to break through.

What else could they try? That question prompted the company’s senior leadership to come to IDEO. They were looking for a perspective that differed from their usual approach—one that could reveal new possibilities on top of everything they had built.

A revelation from consumers

Even though the client already had detailed data, we decided to conduct in-depth consumer interviews during our design research phase. Our goal was to start from a more fundamental place—to understand how people lived day to day and the role these products played in their lives.

From the client’s perspective, this seemed like a wasted effort. They struggled to understand why we wouldn’t simply begin with their assumed starting point: “Why do consumers choose our brand, and what do they expect from our flagship category?”

But the way consumers actually choose products revealed the “why” behind that question.

Whether they were “core consumers” who already frequently purchased the brand’s products, or “extreme consumers” whose preferences were well outside the mainstream, the decision-making process for buying these products was the same.

It started with a broad desire, for instance, “I want to try something different.”

From there, their life stage, immediate circumstances, and emotional state shaped that desire into a more specific need: “This is the type of product I’m looking for.”

Only then did consumers consider: “Which brand should I buy?”

In contrast, the client’s original framing—“Why do consumers choose our brand?”—treated the endpoint of the consumer’s decision journey as the starting point.

From a consumer’s perspective, this might seem obvious; it’s something we all do instinctively every time we shop.

But what is intuitive to the consumer is rarely intuitive to the brand.

Mapping out a consumer’s actual decision-making process provides significant value for a brand. It establishes a consumer-centered through line that helps leaders navigate innovation in a mature category with greater precision.

Several elements naturally align along this through line: the deeper needs of various consumer types, the moments and motivations that trigger a purchase, the opportunity areas where a mature category can effectively meet specific consumer needs, and the competitive strengths the brand should build on to fulfill those needs. Not only do these components become clearer, but they also create interconnections among them.

The core insights from our design research defined those triggering moments and illustrated the map of how consumers actually make decisions. This clarity, in turn, helped the brand’s leaders determine where to focus their efforts in order to revive a mature category.

Building system-wide alignment from a human-centered insight

We took everything we’d heard from consumers, distilled the decision-making processes behind them, and translated everything into visuals on a series of boards, which we then brought into the client’s meeting room.

Step by step, we walked through the consumer’s chain of logic, highlighting what each need meant for the brand’s approach to category innovation. When we finished, a C-level executive at the company looked at the boards and said, “This is a billion-dollar idea.”

The insight disrupted the default reflex of category leaders, who often claim to prioritize consumer needs while unconsciously starting every decision from their brand’s own business priorities.

At first glance, taking a human-centered route may seem like a detour. In practice, it helps companies avoid the wasted investments that come from acting on incorrect assumptions. A clear understanding of what consumers truly need allows a brand to recognize which of its existing strengths to double down on, and which emerging opportunities are genuinely worth pursuing.

After that meeting, the direction for category innovation quickly took shape. The key insight regarding consumer needs and decision-making became a powerful anchor. The insight unified early-stage product development, mid-to-late-stage packaging design and manufacturing, and the marketing communications that followed the launch.

Beyond charting a new course for the client’s flagship category, the project established a framework for cross-functional teams to build a shared understanding and work toward a common goal.

In the end, the collaboration was successful because everyone involved in the project maintained a primary focus: human-centered thinking.

‍
“The Making of...” is a series of behind-the-scenes articles written by IDEO Shanghai designers about our innovation methods and work with major clients across industries in China.

Success can create its own echo chamber. The more a company achieves, the easier it is to rely on familiar ways of seeing the market—often without even realizing it.

Healthcare was once centered on the doctor’s office. Today, it’s moving into the home. Since the pandemic, demand for at-home testing has surged, with 82 percent of older adults saying they’re interested in taking medical tests at home, and many preferring to age in place. From at-home influenza tests and COVID-19 swabs to cervical cancer collection kits and continuous health monitoring, people are taking a more active role in managing their care, with tools that enable both testing and tracking from home.

Designing for this shift means supporting people without medical training—who may struggle to interpret data, who might be nervous about collecting samples, or who might wonder about the efficacy of a test they perform themselves. In my work at IDEO, I’ve identified six principles for creating home-use diagnostics and monitoring tools that are more intuitive, reliable, and easier to use.

1. Design for emotion

Medical tests can evoke powerful feelings: fear of receiving bad news, memories of lost loved ones, or general anxiety. As a designer with a background in social science, I recognize that emotions often drive behavior. Our role as designers is to anticipate these emotional responses and design solutions that support them.

On a cancer screening project, for instance, we found that some users postponed testing not because they didn’t understand how to use the tests, but because they were afraid of the results. To address this, we softened the typography, refined the color palette, and shifted the messaging to focus on taking care of one’s health rather than screening for illness.

On a separate project, we discovered a completely different emotional pain point: clunky health monitors can be perceived as a sign of aging, making people feel self-conscious about wearing them. Which is a fair point. Medical devices often look outdated compared to sleek consumer technology. This disconnect can be emotionally jarring—and socially stigmatizing. To rectify this, we focused on portability and aesthetic improvements. The goal wasn’t to turn a home heart monitor into an iPhone, but to make it feel like a tool for enhancing well-being rather than just surviving an illness.

Time and again, we see that providing patients with a premium-feeling device or thoughtfully designed packaging can transform a medical experience from being a source of embarrassment into a moment that reinforces confidence and self-care.

2. Make use of the unboxing moment

First impressions of medical devices matter. If users can’t immediately see components or have to dig through packaging material, they may assume that the testing process is complicated or time-consuming, too. 

During one at-home cancer screening project, we discovered that many people opened the box, took a quick look, and decided to postpone the test because it looked too overwhelming. By redesigning the unboxing experience to make the components and instructions more visible, participants reported feeling more confident and in control.

With some thoughtful changes, the unboxing moment can feel like an act of empowerment. Blank spaces on boxes can be valuable real estate for reassuring messages or simple diagrams, ensuring that essential information isn’t left buried in the instructions.

3. Keep it familiar

At-home screenings are a relatively new concept, and can feel intimidating. People often worry they won’t be able to perform the tests correctly—or worse, that making a mistake could invalidate their results. Thoughtful design can help alleviate these fears by leaning into familiarity and clarity.

When an IDEO team collaborated with Teal Health on an at-home cervical cancer test, they designed the testing wand to resemble a tampon—a form and function that many users were already familiar with and comfortable using. 

Similarly, for an at-home stool collection kit for another client, we designed components that mimicked the contours of a toilet bowl, making the overall experience feel more intuitive.

4. Make data relatable

Designing at-home health monitoring systems requires a careful balance between what patients want to know and what healthcare providers need to see. Providing too much information can overwhelm patients, while too little can leave them feeling powerless. To drive adoption and adherence, designers must connect the data to patients’ real needs and challenges, empowering them to navigate their health effectively. 

Recently, an IDEO team was designing an implant to monitor organ health. Data from the implant would go directly to the physician for review, but patients also wanted to see the results themselves. In today’s world, where smartwatches can track heart rates and sleep cycles, people expect feedback from health tools. When devices withhold information, it can feel as if they’re keeping secrets. To address this, we recommended a simple, intuitive interface: a stoplight notification system (green = all good, yellow = contact your doctor), along with the option to view a trend graph over time. Patients had the agency they desired, while more complex data remained accessible only to physicians. 

In another project focused on at-home bladder monitoring, we discovered that a device that indicates bladder fullness was life-changing for patients who struggled to empty their bladders. People who felt homebound by the fear of embarrassing accidents or infections reported that the device would help them gain the confidence to plan their days and reclaim their lives. Even though the device would require surgery, the possibility of increased freedom was so appealing that patients felt it was worth the risk. The quality-of-life improvements the data enabled—not the monitor itself—motivated them to embrace this new device. 

5. Lean into visual instructions

More words don’t always equal more clarity. In fact, overly detailed, multi-page instruction packets can discourage people from engaging and may give the impression that a test is too technical, even if the language is at a fourth-grade reading level. 

In one project, we simplified an 11-step test guide into a user-friendly design with three main steps. We reduced the amount of text, emphasized illustrations, and broke down the process into manageable parts to make it feel achievable. This visual-first approach not only made the instructions easier to follow but also reduced user anxiety and improved accessibility for people with reading disabilities and those who speak English as an additional language.

6. Look to family and caregivers

While we typically think of patients as individuals, it’s important to recognize that they exist within complex networks of family, friends, and communities that support and supplement their abilities. When we do research for at-home devices and monitors, patients often request to be interviewed alongside their caregiver, or vice versa. Successful at-home medical monitoring and testing must take into account the motivations and needs of everyone involved in the patient care ecosystem. 

Product teams may assume that older patients will not want to use even basic technology. This might not be true, and even when it is, it’s worth remembering that the end user might not always be the patient. At times, a caregiver might be more invested in the outcomes of monitoring or testing than the patient themselves, and could be more open to embracing digital and tech-forward solutions. 

It’s this kind of health ecosystem thinking that becomes crucial as at-home testing and tracking grow more prevalent. What we have now may feel revolutionary compared to the pre-pandemic era of mandatory in-person care. Many innovations that once felt like futuristic fantasies—such as headsets that help treat depression and saliva-based hormone tracking to support conception—are now available for home use. Still, the potential that lies before us is far greater. 

But only if designers get it right. By keeping human needs—across patient, caregiver, and providers—at the center, we can build more advanced solutions that help people take action on their own health.

Need help designing some at-home experiences of your own? Get in touch.

“Providing patients with a premium-feeling device or thoughtfully designed packaging can transform a medical experience from being a source of embarrassment into a moment that reinforces confidence and self-care."

In our healthcare work, we’re constantly partnering with clients to solve big, seemingly intractable problems that prevent them from delivering the care patients need. Bad UX. Tangled bureaucracy. Stigma. Disinformation. Systems that were never designed to communicate with one another or effectively serve people. These barriers ultimately decide who gets better and who doesn’t.

Over the decades, we’ve learned it’s easier to tame these monsters if you name them. So we’ve turned them into creatures to help people identify and defeat the obstacles that prevent them from delivering the healthcare experiences and outcomes that patients (and employees) truly deserve. 

Here are five bogeymen we keep encountering in our healthcare work, and some projects that have taught us how to vanquish them.

The Abominable Experiences Monster

Many medical procedures are more uncomfortable than they need to be. Women’s health, in particular, is full of experiences that feel a little medieval—painful, invasive, and undignified. Each one nudges patients toward skipping their next appointment.

The Abominable Experience Monster devours appointments. It also gobbles up early diagnoses, follow-up care, and long-term relationships between patients and clinicians that fuel good healthcare.

This is particularly true when it comes to cervical cancer screenings. When detected early, this form of cancer is completely preventable. But one in four American women is not up to date with their screenings. To address this issue, we partnered with Teal Health to reinvent the screening experience, focusing on much more than just the speculum.

Together, we designed a method for patients to collect their own samples at home, one-handed while standing, with clear instructions and welcoming packaging. In 2025, the FDA authorized the device. During the trial, 87 percent of participants reported that the new in-home experience made them more likely to stay current with their screenings. 

Taming this monster starts with a question that isn’t asked often enough in healthcare: “Does it need to feel like this?”

The Entrenched Complexity Monster

This monster stymies progress. Departments operate as fiefdoms. A patient’s record sits inside three different systems. A small change requires six committees. Clinicians who want to improve the patient experience run out of energy trying to fight the system.

Newton-Wellesley Hospital came to us because they saw an opportunity to drive better patient outcomes through cultural and organizational change. We worked together to imagine a different future for the hospital, then prototyped it in phases.

The team at the Women’s Imaging Center kicked things off by reimagining the mammogram experience. They defined the principles for the experience they wanted to create and designed prototypes to gather patient feedback. Then, they became ambassadors, helping other departments take on their own monsters. Patient-centered ideas soon spread, including a practice that the hospital integrated directly into its medical records: a method for flagging each patient’s communication and care preferences, allowing providers to meet them in ways that made them most comfortable.

The Entrenched Complexity Monster is tamed one project at a time. Each time a department demonstrates that change is possible, the monster shrinks a little more.

The Ingrained-Barriers Monster

For a teenager seeking mental health support, there can be multiple barriers to care: from parents who don’t believe in therapy and months-long waitlists, to school counselors who are overwhelmed with the needs of 400 other students and the high costs of treatment. Combine these challenges, and you’re dealing with a juggernaut. 

The Ingrained-Barrier Monster festers in the gaps between systems that were never designed to support the people who need them most—especially young people.

Our solution? Design with them. We partnered with Kooth, the California Department of Healthcare Services, and hundreds of young Californians to create Soluna: an app featuring evidence-based behavioral health tools, free coaching, and resources designed by the people who will eventually use them. Soluna is now available for free to six million young people across California. 

The Fragmented Systems Monster

For a working family in Lima, Peru, accessing routine healthcare services is a patchwork experience. Affordable, comprehensive care can be extremely hard to find. The Fragmented Systems Monster thrives in these cracks. It costs patients both time and money and, at times, leads them to miss appointments altogether.

Intercorp wanted to build something different: clinics specifically designed for Peru’s emerging middle class, rather than modifying existing models that weren’t intended for them. Before launching a real clinic, they constructed a full-scale prototype—a fake clinic—where patients could experience every aspect of their visit: registration, waiting room, examination, and pharmacy. Afterward, patients provided feedback on what was and wasn’t working. That feedback shaped Aviva, a clinic that opened in 2019 and now offers over 30 specialties. Since opening its doors, Aviva providers have performed more than 3,000 surgeries and assisted with more than 5,000 births.

Taming the Fragmented Systems Monster begins with a counterintuitive idea: quickly build a tangible, rough version of connected care, allowing patients to guide you in getting it right.

The Convoluted Comms Monster

Today’s parents receive a lot of information from their pediatricians, but they also turn to wellness influencers, online forums, and screenshots shared by people in their networks. By the time they’re in the doctor’s office, their opinions on care have been shaped by numerous sources, not all of which agree with each other.

The Convoluted Comms Monster flourishes in this noise, derailing even the most critical conversations, such as those a pediatrician must have with a concerned parent about a new immunization or vaccine.

When Sanofi prepared to launch Beyfortus—the first-ever RSV immunization for infants—the biopharma company approached us with a big question: How might we help pediatricians communicate clearly with worried parents across languages and cultures and amid the swirl of misinformation surrounding new medical developments? Together, we created materials to facilitate these important conversations. Beyfortus successfully launched in time for the 2024–2025 RSV season. Demand was so strong that Sanofi tripled its manufacturing capacity, and the immunization has been shown to reduce infant hospitalizations by 82 percent.

Taming this monster is about providing clinicians with clear, human-centered resources to cut through the noise, ultimately helping the parents in front of them and the children who depend on them.

Taming what’s blocking the way

At their core, these monsters arise from human decisions, organizational habits, and inherited assumptions. While technical issues may exacerbate the problems, strategy or software alone cannot resolve them. 

The work is to find the monster, name it, and begin taming it by focusing on cultural behaviors and ways of working; in other words, prioritizing people, not just products.

We’ll be at HLTH Europe in Amsterdam later this month, on the lookout for more monsters. Bring us the obstacles in your work that feel too big, too tangled, or too entrenched for you to face. We’ll help you name them. And then we’ll help you tame them.

Have a monster of your own? Get in touch.

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Special thanks to Ellora Jaggi and Tanya Kar for their work making the monsters come to life.

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Here are the five bogeymen we keep encountering.

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Tucked away behind the brightly-colored restaurant fronts of East London’s Brick Lane is Second Home, a co-working space housing the design team of “vibe coding” company Lovable, one of the fastest-growing start-ups in history.

Founded in 2023 by Swedish software engineers Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin, and currently valued at $6.6 billion, Lovable’s mission is to make software development accessible to everyone, not just the 0.6 percent of the planet who are professional developers. The firm talks about their goal as “building the last piece of software.”

Nad Chishtie, Head of Design at Lovable, discovered his passion for building through his childhood obsessions with music, online gaming, and computers. Initially drawn to coding at the age of 8, he later “fell into design by accident” when he discovered he preferred problem-solving to programming. After stints at two hypergrowth companies, Cmune and Element, he had an epiphany. “With the launch of OpenAI’s GPT-3, I was able to do 70 percent of the coding work of seven full-time developers. I thought, ‘Everything's going to change.’” This realization led Chishtie to seek out the most ambitious people in this space, which ultimately led him to Lovable co-founder Anton Osika.

I spoke with Chishtie at Second Home about the skills people need to design with AI, Lovable’s unique culture, the pros and cons of collaborating with agents, and why humans—and optimism—will always matter. 

Ed White (EW): We’re increasingly hearing about a newer discipline called “design engineering” at companies like Lovable. What does that mean in practice?

Nad Chishtie (NC): It's essentially applying design thinking to code. Depending on your technical skills, design engineering could focus more on front-end development, microinteractions, or the architecture needed to support multiple initiatives. 

An interesting example of a design engineer is Niklas, who joined us as the team’s second designer and has a background in industrial design. Until last year, he hadn’t written code professionally. Now, he’s the third-largest contributor to the Lovable codebase. That’s because today there are two paths: Path A involves ideation, creating comps, and managing stakeholders, while Path B is about directly translating ideas into code with 100 percent fidelity. Path B wins a lot. It’s why Niklas’ learning curve was just a couple of months.

It’s difficult to find people with this skill set, but a single person with this shape can be as valuable as an entire team. 

Path B also means that, in design, we can drive initiatives forward without needing technical support or advocating for inclusion in the engineering roadmap. We can just implement ideas directly. 

Initially, some of the engineering leaders questioned why the design department was hiring engineers. But after we became productive, their response changed. Now, it's one of the most requested roles within our company.

EW: What mindsets or skills are required to be a successful design engineer?

NC: You need to be a very strong systems thinker. Instead of focusing on a specific solution, you’re developing the system that enables that solution to exist.

In classic lean startup methodology, the focus has been on specializing both people and products. With AI, you need to do the inverse and adopt a generalist mindset—for two reasons. First, it’s more challenging to constrain AI models than to let them operate freely. Second, by allowing models to evolve and get better without constraints, your product improves, too. By thinking like a generalist, your product expands its footprint in tandem with AI’s growth. To design at the frontier of AI, you need to invert your perspective.

‍EW: What’s different about designing with LLMs?

NC: When you design software as a service (SaaS), the main task is to design constraints that make the system more deterministic. With AI, the goal is to develop something that is somewhat deterministic and also truly generative. Because if it isn’t generative, then it’s not truly intelligent; it just mimics patterns or picks templates in the background. This marks a shift in design from focusing on hard constraints to providing a broader design direction, while maintaining certain guardrails. 

EW: How is working with these models changing design?

NC: From a technological perspective, we’re ruthlessly trying to reduce the time between having an idea and making it tangible. This applies to Lovable as a product and also to our internal practices. For instance, in our development pipeline, we’re trying to streamline processes as much as possible. If someone here has an idea and is curious about its viability, they can quickly tag an agent and receive immediate feedback. Today, it’s standard for a tech company to spend minutes, hours—even days—testing out a single part of their code base. Our goal is to reduce that time to zero. 

In terms of people’s time here at Lovable, there are no sunk costs with LLMs. We can adopt a more experimental mindset and go from a customer insight to a tangible iteration within a few minutes. Then, we can share that with more people, gather feedback, and decide whether to double down on the idea or delete it. It's totally acceptable to pivot because the turnaround cycle was minutes. 

EW: Lovable is one of the organizations that’s early to work with agents on a daily basis. What’s that experience like?

NC: We try to think of agents as if they were people. They need to have the proper context about how our team works, what’s important to us, the principles and philosophies behind our decisions, and what constitutes a good or bad decision. We have banks and banks of knowledge and skills that codify our thought processes for ourselves and for agents. They’re like a human employee onboarding Wiki, but for agents.

‍EW: What do agents do in practice, and what roles do they play in design?

NC: One role is called a “Linter.” You write some code, and then a Linter will dynamically check it against our codebase. A simple example is keyboard focus. Imagine you have an application with 20 different features that need to be added at various times. Keyboard focus can be quite invisible, making it challenging to maintain coherence. We have a skill bank dedicated to keyboard focus. If you’re designing or implementing a feature, a Linter might review your work and say, “With my end-to-end view of the application, this is how we think about keyboard focus. In the specific view you’re working in, you definitely should do it this way.” 

Another role is a “Sweeper.” Whenever you propose changes in a pull request, Sweepers conduct a variety of checks. For example, a Sweeper agent might say, “You’re introducing a new mental model for the user here. Here’s a list of related mental models that you should consider. Should we extend an existing mental model instead of adding a new one?”

The final role we’ve found very helpful is the “Critic.” These agents critique your implementations as thoroughly as possible. You can even ask them to imitate experts. For instance, you could prompt, “You are [Danish usability pioneer] Jacob Nielsen. I want you to critique this from a purely UX perspective.” The models are trained on Nielsen’s entire body of work, so you’ll gain insights that reflect Nielsen’s expertise.

EW: What’s been particularly effective for you when you use these agents?

NC: Prompting Critics to ask questions rather than make statements. General-purpose AI is overly sycophantic. Having Critics ask questions flips that dynamic. It keeps you in control, which is crucial since humans are ultimately responsible for the outcomes of these systems, and it encourages you to continuously critique your thinking. 

EW: As you work more often with powerful agents, what do you think the role of humans is?

NC: Human designers must be held accountable. We must create usable, desirable products that feel cohesive. I believe that across all mediums—be it film, TV, music, food, etc.—we have an innate ability to sense whether the people behind them genuinely care and what values guide their work. Do they value speed, a sense of luxury, quality, or something more experiential? I think the same applies to software. For Lovable, the experience of using our product is always the responsibility of the humans on our team; we don’t delegate that responsibility to AI. 

EW: How are team structures changing?

NC: I keep coming back to the word “asymmetry.” We used to build teams in very symmetrical ways at tech companies: you’d have a product manager, engineers, a designer, and possibly a data analyst. This cookie-cutter approach was easy for hiring and HR purposes, but it didn’t necessarily lead to the best products or user experiences. 

Today, team dynamics are evolving. Generalists can manage the entire design process—from user insights and analyzing data to building an initial product and testing it with users. A single generalist can deliver 20 times the value of someone focused on just one part of the process.

EW: What does that mean in terms of the people you look for?

NC: The “K-shaped” economy is an apt analogy for what we look for in design engineers. We’re seeing a split between those who are “AI native” and driven, and those who are more cautious about AI and hesitate. These two types of people are diverging significantly, with compounding effects in both directions. We hire people who are optimistic about AI’s potential and are eager to learn.

We also focus heavily on the slope of someone’s career trajectory—not just where they are today, but where they could be in this quickly evolving environment. During my introductory calls with designers, I spend time discussing their motivations for entering design, major influences from past roles, and self-initiated projects rather than just work history. 

Ultimately, a company’s success comes down to its teams and the products they build. The best team is the one with the highest learning aptitude.

EW: How do you create an environment or culture of experimenting and learning?

NC: One of our core values—“våga vara annorlunda”—means “dare to be different” in Swedish. We encourage our employees to challenge norms and embrace innovation by fostering an environment where failure is acceptable. We encourage rapid experimentation and urge individuals to continually challenge their own workflows. 

Many companies believe they need to adopt a single AI tool to write more code and then deploy it organization-wide. In contrast, at Lovable, we allow everyone to choose their own tools. It’s not only fun, but as the tools evolve and our understanding of how to use them expands, our organization adapts and grows as well. 

We have a few helpful rituals, too. Every Friday, we host open demos to showcase what we’ve been doing during the week. Someone might share, “I figured out this new approach that required overhauling our development environment. If we use agents in this new way, we could be 20 times more productive.” We celebrate these achievements as part of our onboarding process, in our Monday morning meetings, and during our internal company awards. 

EW: What’s important to remember when designing with LLMs?

NC: First, the models themselves are incredibly idiosyncratic; it's almost like having different children, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. To produce truly great outcomes, you need to understand these idiosyncrasies and build around them.

Second, you need to consider the entire system. You can't evaluate models, core product architecture, and user experience in isolation. You have to understand them all and integrate them to create a cohesive user experience.

EW: Any parting thoughts for designers?

NC: Be optimistic. Every door is open right now. I feel like a kid again, discovering technology for the first time. 

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“Design in the Age of AI” is a series of conversations with designers and makers from across industries and disciplines, building the future with AI, today.

“To design at the frontier of AI, you need to invert your perspective."

I lead IDEO’s long-term strategy and emerging growth initiatives.

My career spans entrepreneurship, financial services, and technology, anchored in designing sustainable businesses that make systems and products work better for people. I have led multi-partner innovation portfolios with organizations including Citibank, Fidelity, Nasdaq, and the Gates Foundation, focused on building more human-centered futures. 

I began my career as an entrepreneur, creating new ventures in healthcare and real estate. I hold an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA with distinction from Bates College.

I lead IDEO’s business globally.

A longtime IDEOer and a champion of creative collaboration, I bring a strong belief in the power of design and creativity to solve the world's most complex challenges.

Before taking on the role of CEO, I helped grow IDEO’s global presence, co-founded the Tokyo studio, and launched D4V, Japan’s first early-stage design-focused venture fund. I became a Partner in 2017 and was appointed to the board of IDEO.org in 2020, a role I continue to hold.

While I was away from IDEO, I served as Chief Creative Officer at Moon Creative Lab, a venture studio that powers the creation of new businesses for Mitsui & Co. There, I guided the development of new ventures and led Moon Media, a storytelling initiative exploring creativity and entrepreneurship through film.

As a committed educator, I have taught at esteemed institutions including Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID), New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, and The University of Tokyo. I hold a degree in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California, Berkeley.

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Over the course of my 45-year IDEO career, which originally started by meeting David Kelley at Stanford in the mid-1970s,I have worked as a design engineer, a project leader, a business relationship leader, a studio leader, and a practice leader. I have helped us build and nurture many key long-term client relationships, including Silicon Valley tech firms, Fortune 100 consumer businesses, and health-care companies of all sizes. I have been leading or guiding the “Design for Health” side of IDEO’s business for more than 20 years. I have also been named on 55 granted patents.

I am an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, known as the d.school, where I have taught at least one course each year for the past 45 years. I have led courses on product design, engineering design, and human factors design, as well as design for sustainability, and creativity and innovation. I currently teach the “Design for Healthy Behaviors” course with Dr. Nancy Cuan, M.D. and IDEOer YC Sun

I have a BS in Mechanical Engineering with an emphasis on Industrial Design from the University of Notre Dame and an MS in Product Design from Stanford.

I founded IDEO because I wanted to work in a creative environment surrounded by people I admire. These days, that’s still the case. I get to work with inspired people who have a commitment to making great things happen in the world.

I also founded Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, informally known as the d.school. As Stanford’s Donald W. Whittier Professor in Mechanical Engineering, I am the Academic Director of both of the degree-granting undergraduate and graduate programs in Design within the School of Engineering, where I have been a student or a teacher for nearly 50 years.

I am most passionate about using design to help unlock creative confidence in everyone from students to business executives.

Together, my brother and I co-authored the New York Times best-selling book Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All.

Most AI products today are built for work—a space with clear problems and established systems. One founder noticed a gap: personal life is messier, harder to systematize, and mostly left behind by the AI boom. So she built Cue, a personal AI that lives inside iMessage and group chats, to go where the other tools haven't.

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In this episode, Becca Carroll, IDEO's Chief Strategy Officer, talks with Sida Li, co-founder and CEO of Shared Context Lab, about staying anchored to a human need while the technology around her keeps changing shape, why she treats her business model with the same rigor she'd bring to a product, and what it feels like to build a company at this particular, disorienting moment in AI.

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The conversation also gets into how Sida makes design decisions: the language Cue uses to describe itself, the tradeoffs behind building inside iMessage instead of a new app, and a real story about a business idea that didn’t pan out.

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This is the second in a two-part series profiling founders from IDEO's Startups-in-Residence program. The first conversation is with Johannes Seemann, founder of Sooner, on designing GenAI for the emotional side of money.

Most personal financial tools are built to run the numbers and optimize towards a budget. While that works for some, most people experience money as a lived relationship that does not neatly fit into a spreadsheet. Johannes Seemann and Becca Carroll discuss why money is emotional before it is mathematical, and what a human-centered approach to building a generative AI financial product looks like in practice.

Mina Seetharaman talks with Scott Shigeoka, author of Seek and Head of Curiosity Cultivation at the Eames Institute, about what distinguishes genuinely curious leadership from performative curiosity, how power dynamics shape curiosity, and why practicing curiosity can restore energy rather than drain it.

Mina Seetharaman talks with David Epstein, author of Inside the Box and Range, about why total freedom often produces average work, how leaders can design useful limits on purpose, and what organizations such as General Magic and Pixar reveal about the relationship between boundaries and creativity.