D4V is a Tokyo-based early stage Venture Capital in partnership with IDEO. Two years ago, D4V invested in healthcare startup Ubie, which develops a service called AI Monshin Ubie. The digital service was created with the goal of reducing the burden on healthcare professionals working long hours, under harsh conditions. AI Monshin Ubie automates a number of patient registration and documentation processes through digital tools, enabling doctors to spend less of their time on manual paperwork, and to dedicate their valuable skills and attention to the patients themselves. Currently, the service is installed in 200 medical institutions in 41 prefectures across Japan.

With AI Monshin Ubie, patients fill out preliminary forms on a tablet, rather than paper, entering information about their health history and current symptoms directly into their digital medical record. As patients fill out the questionnaire, the Ubie AI generates questions in real-time according to patients’ responses, which results in more appropriate and accurate data. The patient’s responses are automatically formatted for the doctor to review prior to and during the consultation. As a result, doctor consultation times and facility operation times are drastically reduced.

With the Coronavirus raising fears of a possible health system breakdown, Ubie has made improvements to anticipate and possibly prevent in-hospital infections. Until recently, Ubie’s services have been primarily used by large hospitals; but in light of the global health crisis, Ubie approached D4V—who partners with IDEO—to help rethink the onboarding experience and quickly facilitate the introduction of AI Monshin Ubie in regional clinics across Japan. D4V and IDEO have been working with Ubie for many years to collaborate in various areas, including UX, rebranding, international research, and more. Therefore, they had a foundation of knowledge from which to build these new features.

Typically, AI Monshin Ubie has been introduced to new hospital clients through direct, in-depth instructional visits from Ubie sales staff. This approach has worked well for rolling out the product to Japan’s 8,000 large hospitals; but for the 100,000 smaller clinics, Ubie needed a more efficient onboarding method to enable staff to get set up smoothly and independently.

During research, D4V and IDEO team members engaged with many different clinic staff members, including full-time doctors, part-time doctors, nurses and receptionists. The researchers found that staff tend to react skeptically to new tools and services, with a common preconception that they will add to their workload. One clinic director’s first impression of AI Monshin Ubie was, “It looks complicated.” But once he actually used the service, he realized that it was very user-friendly.

The team quickly understood that it was important to remove preconceptions by clearly communicating Ubie’s benefits and ease of use. They created a two-minute animation and designed three separate guidebooks. The animation adopted a friendly tone and expressed empathy for doctors, staff members and patients, highlighting how Ubie can bring benefits to each of them. The animation showed how Ubie fits into the existing workflow and explained complex systems in a straightforward and accessible way.

WATCH: A short video clip explains the benefit of their product and service to avoid the users’ concerns in advance.

The guidebook for doctors and directors explains how Ubie’s AI smooths the patient consultation experience and greatly improves the quality of medical care. It also introduces concrete how-tos around set-up, implementation, and ideal workflow. FAQs were also included, addressing concerns about whether or not elderly people would be able to use it.

Ubie business development leader Kenji Yamada says, “D4V and IDEO have a deep understanding not only of design, but of our entire business. They provide inspiration by bringing experience and knowledge that comes from working with other industries and clients outside of healthcare. We appreciate that they can share the knowledge that they’ve obtained with our business.”

Read the Japanese-language version of the Ubie case study here.
When You Feel Unwell, Ask Ubie: Check your symptoms for free
Learn more about Ubie: Global Company Website

In the emergency room, an intervention that’s administered too slowly could cost a patient their life. With COVID-19 fueling a surge in acute respiratory conditions, intubation—a procedure that involves inserting a tube through the mouth or nose and into the airway—is more common than ever. For patients struggling to breathe, the tube can be connected to a ventilator that pumps oxygen to the lungs, keeping them alive.

While a laser-focus on the present is critical for successful patient outcomes, hospitals and physicians often don’t have time to look ahead and anticipate the future of the operating room experience. As technology rapidly improves, there is a ripe opportunity and pressing need to evolve medical equipment to be more innovative and intuitive. Verathon Medical, a global medical device manufacturer, is supporting health care providers at the cutting-edge of care.

Verathon approached IDEO to redesign the existing product system for laryngoscopies and bronchoscopies—procedures that examine parts of the throat through intubation. During these examinations, a tube with a camera embedded in the tip is inserted through the patient’s nose or mouth. The doctor can then see inside the throat on a video monitor, and therefore more easily and quickly intubate and perform the exam.

To create a groundbreaking device, the team observed over a dozen laryngoscopies, bronchoscopies, and intubations. They noticed that many anesthesiologists relied on fixed equipment during the procedures. For example, some had grown accustomed to looking over their shoulder—away from the patient—to view the monitor.

During interviews, physicians and residents expressed difficulties with the current technology, sharing that the small screens aren’t conducive to team viewing or student instruction, and they must often use a separate computer to record patient notes. Others reported frustrating workflows, needing to constantly divert their attention and move their hands between the patient, prep tray, monitor, sterile bin, and disposal bin. These inconveniences and inefficiencies are not only cumbersome, but can increase the risk of infection and fatality.

The team relied on these insights to start designing a next-generation product. Through sketching, storyboarding, and building in real-time alongside doctors and clinic staff, designers quickly teased out additional findings and validated concepts.

This work led to the creation of the GlideScope Core: an all-in-one, portable product system that supports both video laryngoscopies and bronchoscopies. The base of the device—a wheeled cart—has built-in storage units for tools and a disposal bin, offering more mobility and accessibility for medical professionals.

The product’s tagline, “see more, do more,” points to the improvements made to the video system, including a large 10- or 15-inch high-definition touch screen monitor. Displayed images can be enlarged and rotated 180 degrees for improved visualization, team viewing, resident training, and classroom demonstration. To help doctors keep both the patient and monitor in their line of sight, the detachable screen can be secured to an adjustable arm that can be positioned directly over the patient. Additionally, the monitor’s patient annotation feature gives staff access to more of what they need in one device.

The product has been especially valuable for providers and patients during the coronavirus pandemic, when it’s imperative for doctors to keep their distance from patients’ mouths and noses. The GlideScope Core’s movable, detachable, and large, high-definition monitor makes it easier to take this precaution and intubate more quickly. This usefulness is reflected in the 5-fold increase in cart-based device orders for Verathon. While most providers typically order anywhere from 1 to 20 devices for airway procedures, one hospital system requested 600 GlideScope Core systems to meet current intubation demands.

Through modern technology and a focus on human needs, the GlideScope Core supports improved patient outcomes and creates a more seamless operating experience for medical professionals. The product underlines the key but often overlooked fact that often, in order to ensure the healthcare industry is patient-centered, medical device manufacturers and hospitals must also focus on improving the experience of providers.

Healthcare is notoriously difficult to change. Rules and regulations present complex barriers; health practitioners and organizations often have entrenched ways of working; and lives are literally on the line. Despite these significant barriers, the leaders at Newton-Wellesley Hospital (NWH) boldly committed to improving patient care through a new approach.

NWH is a community teaching medical center in Newton, Massachusetts. Because of its proximity to Boston—a city known for world-class healthcare institutions—NWH needed to differentiate itself. The hospital's new president, Dr. Michael R. Jaff, reached out to IDEO for help: "I knew that providing an unparalleled patient experience would set us apart from our competitors." But, Dr. Jaff’s particular approach was unique. He and Dr. Jodi Larson, Chief Quality and Experience Offer (CQXO), saw an opportunity to drive better patient outcomes through cultural and organizational change.

"You cannot learn any more than when you get to listen to your potential patients say why they would never walk into your place." —Dr. Michael R. Jaff

IDEO partnered with NWH for a year of work together, kicked off by defining the vision for NWH and ramping up to in-hospital prototyping and the launch of several new initiatives. A pilot project with the Women's Imaging Center (WIC) focused on solving departmental and employee challenges to provide a better experience for women getting mammograms.

Fueled by this potential, the WIC team redesigned key work processes and created a set of experience principles that inspired new service prototypes. Guided by principles like "Express mutual gratitude" and "Honor every voice," the WIC team tested ways for patients to acknowledge outstanding caregivers and created tools to gather better feedback from patients and adjust quickly. The experience of designing better services inspired the WIC staff to become ambassadors for the power of design thinking across other departments inside NWH and they continue to build on the work through new prototypes and experiments.

Next, IDEO partnered with NWH’s ambulatory surgery group. They took an analogous research trip to Boston’s Logan airport to see with fresh eyes how other high-touch customer service organizations provide customer value in a complex setting. Insights from the trip were applied through live prototyping of several new experiences inside the hospital, including a pre-surgery visit summary and pre-operation care carts.

Analogous research helped us realize that we can learn from other industries and incorporate some (cool) best practices if we allow ourselves to get over the ‘that would never work in the hospital’ mentality. - Dr. Jodi Larson

One of the most impactful prototypes was Care Modes, a tool to empower the NWH care teams to tailor their approach and interaction with patients based on the patients’ unique needs, beyond simply their clinical requirements. Four distinct approaches were identified for engaging a patient before surgery—Explain, Partner, Embrace, and Encourage. The Care Mode is determined based on the provider's understanding of a patient's degree of self-advocacy and their confidence that surgery is the best solution to their issue.

Historically, care providers have been trained to deliver consistent care above all else. However, Care Modes powerfully acknowledge that patients respond differently to different types of care. The Care Modes empower the team—from surgeon to nurse to anesthesiologist—with a clear framework for how to interact with and provide care for patients so they feel most comfortable. Based on the prototype's success with patients and impact on the staff culture, NWH has incorporated Care Modes into EPIC, the hospital's electronic medical record.

The importance of being patient-centered has been central to the healthcare conversation over the past thirty years; but new explorations reveal that there’s far more potential for innovation and improvement when the provider experience is considered in tandem with the patient’s. Each enables the other, and design for both together yields stronger solutions and better outcomes. IDEO's work with NWH demonstrates this vital shift in user-centered healthcare—one can't design services and experiences for patients without designing for their providers’ culture as well. When these go hand-in-hand, meaningful institutional change in healthcare is more than possible.

The mission of Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) is to inspire children to achieve their full potential in the fields of science, technology, medicine, and engineering. Leaders at MSI realized they needed to drive day-to-day operations and maintain historic exhibits while focusing on where to go next. To prepare for its next decade, MSI worked with IDEO to create a new business focus to support the museum’s aspirations for the future. The plan would allow MSI to respond to the demands of the marketplace and raise the funds to get there.

At the beginning of the project, MSI laid out its priorities: improve equity of access, enhance the museum experience, and create a more innovative culture. To dive into each of these areas, IDEO conducted immersive research with families, teachers, donors, and staff.

IDEO brought together 60-plus donors, board members, and staff members to engage in a design thinking exercise to unpack and address the tensions that come with choosing a new strategic trajectory. Instead of having a standard ballot vote, the IDEO team encouraged participants to get up and vote with their feet, helping the group of stakeholders physically align on the museum’s new direction.

At the end of the research and prototyping phases, MSI and IDEO developed a vision called Provoking Minds, Inspiring Futures, creating six detailed design briefs to equip MSI teams to bring initiatives forward. The briefs laid out everything from recommending a new Department of Next, dedicated to ensuring that the future is at the heart of everything the MSI does, to MSI Runway, a place for experimental, small-scale, and limited-run exhibits. The ideas were brought to life with an interactive exhibit, built quickly with everyday materials like plywood and circuit boards, to demonstrate that creating an inspiring vision of the future doesn’t have to be an expensive endeavor.

The team also focused on insights that highlighted accessibility issues some families brought up early in the design process—travel across the city via public transportation can be lengthy, and the cost of admission to special exhibits could be prohibitive. To address these concerns, IDEO came up with the Mission Accessible brief: Inspired by casino buses, MSI bus stop signs would be posted in various low-income neighborhoods, signaling a way to take kids and families to the museum for free.

During the project, the IDEO team identified some low-hanging fruit, like rethinking ticketing and improving the student field trip experience, and helped the museum create cross-functional innovation teams to apply design thinking skills towards solving those challenges. They researched, brainstormed, and pushed forward new concepts, meeting weekly to share and build on ideas. At the end of the four week period, each team prototyped their ideas—new outdoor programming, software tools for visiting tour groups—and pitched them to each other.

In 2019, two years after the conclusion of the project, the collaboration paid off. With its new strategic plan and additional resources, the museum has renewed its commitment to serving youth, and MSI’s team, including donors, are aligned on a collective vision of the future. MSI raised more funds than in any previous year, including the single largest gift in its history—$125 million, nearly half of its $380 million fundraising goal—that will help ensure the years ahead.

There’s still a tremendous amount of change that needs to happen at the corporate level, but we now see some big food companies responding with greater transparency in sourcing, cleaner labels, and more natural ingredients.

Project Drawdown, one of the most comprehensive and respected plans to reverse climate change, lists the top 100 solutions to reverse global warming. Eight of the top 20 are connected to the food system, including reducing food waste, adopting a plant-rich diet, and supporting regenerative agriculture.

For example, the food we waste is responsible for about eight percent of global emissions. And it turns out your own kitchen is ground zero for potential impact: US households account for 27 million tons of the 63 million tons of wasted food per year.

We use design thinking to help our clients run towards big challenges like food waste, but the same principles can make an impact in your own home. We can each prototype our way towards new practices in our kitchen. Food is, after all, one of the most forgiving materials, and even the most abject kitchen failure is usually edible.

Here are five simple ways to design think your way towards addressing climate change in your own kitchen.

1. Adopt an experimental mindset

I bet you've heard some of this before, but it bears repeating: If each of us replaced a third of the beef we eat with pork, chicken or legumes, the World Resources Institute reports that our food-related emissions would fall by around 13 percent. But adopting a more flexitarian, plant-rich diet is a serious behavior shift, and not an easy one.

What if we reframed “never eating steak again” as “experimenting with eating mostly plants”? Trine Hahnemann, a Danish culinary writer, tells a story about her family’s generational transition to a plant-rich diet. Her grandma’s recipe for a pork dish called for meat as the main ingredient. Later in the 1970s, her mom adjusted the recipe so it used only half the pork. Today, Hahnemann cooks the same family dish but with no pork at all.

The design challenge is crafting plant-based options that are so satisfying and enticing that you don’t miss the meat. Like Hahnemann, we can experiment our way there. Start slowly by removing meat from traditional recipes. My meat-free pozole soup was an experiment, and though it lacked the oily richness of the pork version, it was a satisfyingly rich broth with hearty beans—another edible prototype.

2. Buy less

Not all food waste is created equal. That moldy tomato you never got around to eating used up more resources than a tomato left on the vine: Resources were used for it to be picked, packed, shipped to a grocery store, unpacked, stocked, selected, paid for, brought home, and now rotted. It takes two months for that tomato to decompose in the compost, during which time it releases methane into the atmosphere—which produces eight times more emissions than carbon.

When you head to the store or farmers market, simply bringing home less food will do wonders to cut down food waste. Embrace discomfort—a key design principle—by grabbing a smaller shopping basket to constrain your purchases, even though it might feel like you’re not buying enough.

Once you get home, use a Sharpie to date your food to remind yourself to enjoy it within a particular time frame. Place your “cook first” ingredients in the front so you’re more likely to reach for them.

3. Buy better

Design requires inspiration. To bring this to your food choices, make going to your local farmers market every week a habit. With each visit, you’ll get inspired by seasonal produce and begin to unlearn the mentality of having anything, anytime (and having it look perfect). Nature has constraints, and this is one of them.

Shopping at farmers markets also helps farmers and can promote sustainable soil practices, which is one of our only proven ways to sequester carbon. Not only is good farming beneficial for the soil, but it’s a bonus for your taste buds. Healthy soil helps farmers grow flavorful, nutrient-rich produce. Good flavor is often a proxy for good nutrients. If you buy an apple that was grown using regenerative agriculture techniques, you will taste the difference: It will be juicy and delicious, not to mention rich in nutrients. But an apple picked a year ago, shipped across the country or world, and kept in cold storage only offers you sugar and fiber—the nutrients died long ago. As Alice Waters put it, “You want aliveness in your food.”

4. Embrace constraints

Design constraints in the kitchen range from your cooking skills, to your work space, to your available equipment, to your budget, to the ingredients themselves. Whatever those constraints are, embrace them. Most chefs say quality salt, quality olive oil, and heat (whether a hot plate or six burner) are the only critical elements.

Culinary confidence in the kitchen—feeling like you have the skills to make something worth eating—can help you boldly embrace constraints. The good news is that culinary confidence is a muscle that grows stronger as you use it.

To build your culinary confidence, read Tamar Adler’s book, The Everlasting Meal. It’s made me give up on exactitude in the kitchen, and instead take delight in using a recipe as a jumping off point and improvising by cooking with what’s on hand. Her simple approaches to dealing with food that might otherwise go to waste—like smashing leftover garlicky beans on toast for an easy dinner—help us look at our fridges with a new sense of frugality and hope.

Try making pesto out of leafy greens (even carrot tops), nuts, and hard cheese you have around, rather than feeling like it has to be basil, pine nuts, and parm. There are no rules, just constraints that make you more creative.

5. Collaborate

At the United Nations Climate Summit last month, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg told a group of world leaders, “The world is waking up, and change is coming whether you like it or not.”

We’ve reached a tipping point, and change is coming. With your friends and family, let’s make time to cook and eat together. Let’s share a meal and talk about how to have a better life with less waste and more joy. And if there are leftovers, send your guests home with them, date them in your fridge, or use them to make soup tomorrow.

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There have been some exciting changes in the food industry over the last decade. Our purchasing choices collectively forced food brands to rethink their offers and evolve their practices.

Embracing conversations about taboo topics can help deepen understanding and empathy, and empower people to make better decisions about their health, finances, and careers. And since many taboos are related to serious global epidemics, like homelessness and segregation, talking about these issues is the first step toward taking action—and even affecting real change.

Thankfully, surfacing taboo topics doesn’t have to be as awkward or scary as it might seem.

Did you join millions of people to dump an ice bucket on your head to raise awareness for ALS, and suddenly find yourself discussing (and maybe even donating on behalf of) a disease you didn’t have a personal connection to? What if you walked into middle school health class, and your teacher was wearing tampon earrings or giving out anatomical cupcakes that made you laugh and made it easier to talk about periods?

Play has the power to translate fear and awkwardness into curiosity, with humor, storytelling, games, and interactive experiences that can help people feel comfortable (and even enjoy) diving into a tricky topic.

Here are three ways to start a conversation about anything—even the most taboo topics—through playful design.

1. Create an immersive experience

Death is terrifying. “Reimagine End of Life,” a city-wide exploration of life and death with creative workshops, performances, comedy shows, and reflections, makes it easier to wrap your head around. Last year in San Francisco, I joined 10 strangers in an interactive theatre experience inspired by the question, “What if facing our death allowed us to live more fully?”

Through virtual reality simulations, eulogy readings, and a theatrical visit to purgatory (picture white curtains and costumed actors), the event immersed our group in a new world and guided us to face death together, one step at a time. A year later, I still find myself reflecting on this experience and sharing my hopes and fears about dying.

At your next event, try incorporating skits, role play, costumes, and themed decorations to fully immerse your group in the topic you’re discussing. These interactive elements can create a safe environment for people to really open up.

2. Meet people where they play

Sex and contraception can be intimidating and even embarrassing topics to discuss in many cultures, making it difficult for health experts to dispel myths and support youth as they make decisions about their bodies. But dance contests, magazines, nail salons, and fashion shows? Those teens can get behind.

In Zambia and Kenya, IDEO.org has brought playful experiences to life through The Diva Centers as well as through the upbeat Future Fab brand, which give teens and staff a space to connect and talk about anything—from glittery nails to IUDs. The IDEO.org team has also designed aspirational characters known as the Divine Divas to give the girls an opportunity to talk about their goals for the future—and how contraceptives might fit into them.

If you’re looking to tackle a taboo topic with a specific group of people, consider their natural gathering places. Do they go rock-climbing, cook, or hike? By meeting people where they feel most comfortable, you can make difficult conversations easier to navigate.

3. Forgo words altogether

For topics so complex that we don’t know where to begin—how about by translating words into motion? Creative Tensions is a “conversation that moves” developed by IDEO and the Sundance Institute Theatre Program, where participants reveal where they stand on an issue by where they physically stand and move in the room along a spectrum between two options. The exercise can help people explore polarizing topics by asking, for example, “What inhibits our sexual lives more—the government and society, or ourselves?” Participants can either share their perspective aloud in a facilitated conversation or express themselves silently through their movement alone. It’s a non-verbal way to start meaningful explorations of taboo topics that everyone can be a part of, simply by moving their feet.

To do something similar, try asking people to express their thoughts without words—through dance, music, drawing, photography, or building with LEGOs. These creative exercises can lower the barrier to entry and prompt even the most reticent to participate, and eventually, start talking.

With thoughtful design, breaking the ice on complex topics can be more playful than painful. Between comic books and board games about menstruation, superhero-themed summer camps about social issues, and ballot education parties, there are countless ways to help people navigate controversial topics.

What methods do you use to help get people talking? Send your ideas so we can work together to unlock meaningful conversations around the causes we care most about.

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Cancer, sex, money, birth control, poverty—just a handful of topics on a list many of us might call Things I Want to Bring Up But Don’t Know How. But shying away from stigma keeps people from talking about the issues that really matter.

When I started at IDEO six years ago, I had no idea what a systems designer was—only that I was one. Now, six years later, I have an answer, but I’m still perfecting the great-aunt-approved dinner table pitch.

The secret? It’s actually something you probably learned in your grade school language arts class: a good analogy.

If you’ve got approximately 10 minutes, I can tell you what I’ve learned about what I now proudly call my job—and how I’ve learned to explain it.

Systems and automobiles

An iPhone, the human body, buildings, cities, organizations, economies, the universe—all of those things count as systems, even though one can fit in your pocket and one is infinite. So what makes them all systems?

In a series of excellent lectures, Russell Ackoff, a pioneer in systems thinking, uses a simple analogy to explain systems: an automobile.

As Ackoff explains, a car needs to carry you from point A to point B. No individual part of a car can move you on its own—not the wheel, the axle, the seat, or the engine. But a car can. And if you take a car apart, you no longer have a car: you simply have the pieces, because “a system is not the sum of the behavior of its parts; it’s the product of their interactions.” That’s as true for a computer as it is for the universe—or any other system.

Systems design and architecture

Ackoff, a professor at Wharton Business School, criticized managers for focusing on business silos (marketing, operations, finance). He urged them to take a wider systems view—to think about the interactions that create the whole.

I couldn’t agree more. But if that’s systems thinking, what is systems design? What’s the difference?

Ackoff heralded one profession for understanding systems best: architecture. Architects begin with the needs of the client—bedroom, kitchen, living room, bathroom—but they don’t stop there. It wouldn’t make sense to design the rooms separately; they need certain adjacencies and sizes.

Importantly, Ackoff explains, the architect “will never modify the house to improve the quality of the room, unless the quality of the house is simultaneously improved.” To take this analogy a step further, think about it this way: you wouldn’t make the kitchen bigger if it meant getting rid of the bathroom. That would be a weird house.

Ahhh, so you're an architect?

Not exactly, although it’s no coincidence that I used to be a designer at an architecture firm. I think of myself as a “human-centered systems designer,” but that wouldn’t be the clearest thing to have on a business card.

IDEO is known for human-centered design, a process that takes inspiration from the needs and aspirations of people, most often end users. Human-centered systems design also starts with people, but requires looking at all the diverse stakeholders within a system—not just end users.

Let’s dive into another analogy: a school. If you’re designing a school, students are the end user. But the needs of teachers, parents, and administrators are equally important. For example, a few years ago we wanted to create a way for schools to change their culture. Since culture is intangible, it can’t be designed in and of itself. But you can design spaces, schedules, processes, roles, rituals, and incentives—tangible “levers for change” that help create culture. We zeroed in on the needs of school leaders, and developed School Retool, a professional development program that empowers principals to evolve their school culture.

When you’re designing a system with a lot of moving pieces, it’s hard to know where to start, and very easy to get lost in the “What if’s?” Design needs constraints, and focusing on human needs provides them.

But why human-centered systems design?

Let’s return to my man Russell Ackoff. He writes, “No problem ever exists in complete isolation. Every problem interacts with every other problem and is therefore part of a set of interrelated problems, a system of problems.” Ackoff even coined a term for systems of problems—he called them “messes.”

Indeed, our biggest problems—in education, health care, criminal justice, government—are systems challenges. And surprise: These are all human systems. When the parts of a system are made up of people, complexity is exponentially high because human feelings and needs are unpredictable and constantly changing. Despite good intentions, these important societal systems can be some of the least human-centered experiences we encounter today.

None of these problems can be solved in isolation, but it’s also easy to get a headache just thinking about tackling them.

Our most complex systems need human-centeredness the most. As a systems designer, I specialize in zooming in and out. I’m constantly jumping back and forth between the big picture and the details. I work with teams to bring the best of all disciplines together to design individual elements that form an integrated, cohesive experience for end-users. I ask questions like, “How might the environment support the new behaviors we’re trying to create? How might digital tools enable a new mindset?” I create intentional interactions between parts.

As the holidays creep closer and closer, I no longer dread the questions about work and career that come along with the appetizers. I finally have something my family is more likely to understand, thanks to the powerful and beloved literary device known as the analogy. Getting to this point feels like learning how to ride a bike—you pedal hard, gather speed, and finally crest the hill.

And if nothing else, I’ll just send all my family members a link to this piece. Hi, mom and dad!

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Fall has arrived in the northern hemisphere, and you know what that means: cool weather, warm cider, and sitting around the holiday dinner table with my extended family, trying to explain to them what I do for a living as a systems designer.

In the not-too-distant future, patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease could be equipped with a sensor that monitors their medication and inhaler use and prevents acute events. People suffering from clinical depression could be prescribed an app-based therapeutic program in place of a drug.

The digital therapeutics global market is estimated at $1.8 billion today, but predicted to reach $7.1 billion by 2025. Much of the growth is predicted to come through investment from traditional pharma, but there are several new players emerging from the tech and start-up worlds as well with the hopes of evolving into a digital therapeutic. Omada Health, which creates behavior change programs for managing chronic disease, makes its hundreds of thousands of patients feel seen and heard with personal coaching. Click Therapeutics develops software to support smoking cessation and address major depressive disorder in adults. The meditation app Headspace has convinced more than a million people to integrate meditation into their daily lives, with proven wellness benefits.

Companies like these are revealing transformative new approaches to helping patients tackle the thorny challenges at the core of chronic disease, mental health disorders, and a growing number of other diagnoses—and in the process, they’re creating and growing thriving markets where none existed before.

Might these digital products, one day soon, be prescribed by a physician who is concerned about her patients’ heart disease, diabetes, or weight? If Tesla released software that clinically validated reductions in car accidents, even for the most dangerous drivers, would that qualify as a digital therapeutic? We are just beginning to imagine and design the future of this industry.

But these products still face the age-old challenge: how to get people to actually use them. If patients don’t love and trust the experience enough to sustain engagement over long periods, many of these therapies—and products—will fail.

Any new approach needs to begin with the needs of real people, and to follow those needs toward products that are not only desirable, but also have viable business models behind them. Here are our four big takeaways drawn from IDEO’s experience working in this field, designing digital therapeutics that engage patients—and the market.

Put down the competitive landscape report

Innovations in science and health tend to be incremental, but by looking to other industries, it’s possible to identify opportunities for more radical change. Studying analogous experiences—services, products, and other offerings that deliver something tangentially related but not exactly the same—will clarify what kinds of experiences give patients a sense of meaning, delight and value.

A partner of ours in the biotech industry recently launched its first digital therapeutic, focused on helping patients manage diabetes. In piloting the experience, we encountered a big challenge: Patients were struggling to connect the at-home testing device to the bluetooth on their phones. Without it, the experience fell apart.

Instead of buying all of our competitors’ devices to look at their solutions, we brainstormed a list of organizations that were particularly good at helping people with a set of complex instructions—IKEA, ballroom dance instructors, piano teachers, NASA-to-spacecraft communications specialists, and others. We discovered that LEGO had made its first bluetooth-connected toy and—master of instruction that it is—had created instructions to guide even little kids through a simple series of steps. Inspired by LEGO, the team created a new set of instructions. Once they were integrated into the patient onboarding experience, nearly every patient was able to connect their medical device to their phones.

Prioritize the patient

It can be easy to fall into the trap of addressing the needs of payers and providers above the patients’. After all, if a digital therapeutic isn’t reimbursable, the underlying business may not be successful; and if a physician doesn’t know it well enough to prescribe it, a company can’t increase market share. These are critical pieces of the puzzle, but they need to come after the foundational concern of any new digital health venture: fitting your therapy into patients’ lives.

During early stages of design, we rely on user research to inspire countless possibilities, and revisit our insights when we need to refine (or flip) our ideas. User research informs the business model, helps define the path to market, and may also lead to other product features.

What does this look like in practice? Consider the digital mental health company Headspace. Headspace was designed to teach people the fundamentals of meditation, engaging them in an experience that might encourage practice and adherence over time. Initially, Headspace played with incentives like badges and friendly social competition, but it slowly came to understand that the most profound motivation was mental health itself. The company prompted meditators to remember why they meditate, and asked them who in their lives would be better off because they meditated. This consistent call for reflection and awareness led to higher overall engagement.

Headspace’s popularity has catapulted the company to $100M in annual revenue and more than a million subscribers. Once the company designed an experience that people loved, subscribers embraced the product and took it upon themselves to host Facebook groups, meet-ups, and events. Headspace then opened up partnerships within the formal health industry, adapting to the needs and requirements of providers, payers, and regulators. Today, Headspace is a benefit offered to employees of over 350 large companies worldwide, and providers and health systems across the globe offer it to their patients. If you design an effective product that patients love, players in the health system have incentive to offer access.

Design with and for your most extreme, hard-to-engage patients

Designing for extreme users illuminates the wide range of people who might use a product. In IDEO’s earlier days, we saw this most clearly when we designed physical products like ice cream scoopers and pizza slicers for older adults, people with arthritis, and children with limited motor skills. We ended up creating something those populations could use, but in doing so, we developed a universally easier user experience. The product design outshone its competitors and became a top consumer choice.

In the world of digital therapeutics, this approach might entail designing for patients with limited experience using digital technology, or focusing on patients living with multiple chronic conditions, or with profound barriers to accessing care. These patients can help shape a more equitable and inclusive therapeutic experience.

One of our most challenging digital therapeutic projects involved creating an app-based experience to combat depression. To engage with potential users, we traveled to the rural Rocky Mountains to an isolated community where we met Dan, a cowboy and rancher living 40 miles away from his closest neighbor. Dan had struggled with depression for most of his adult life. On a good day, it was hard for him to get out of bed. On a hard day, he struggled with suicidal thoughts.

Before talking to Dan, we considered all of the technological features that could encourage adherence, like enabling offline access and fast download speed in low-bandwidth contexts. But through talking to Dan, it became clear that the tactical challenges weren’t the biggest problem to solve. Even in more populated areas, depression itself can be isolating. Dan helped us co-design a digital tool that even he would be willing to come back to, day after day. One of the key features a digital therapeutic could offer would be connection to others—in real life—and a chance not only to receive help, but to give it. Informed by Dan’s story, we designed an experience that could connect people living with depression to each other and engage them as supporters, mentors, and advocates.

Launch a thousand prototypes

One of the biggest challenges facing health innovation today is the belief that you need to have a solution before you really grasp what people want and how they want it. That’s how the industry is constructed. You would never write a grant proposal without telling the funder exactly what you will deliver, nor allocate budget at a pharmaceutical company without a detailed plan and anticipated ROI.

For digital therapeutics, those constraints are blown wide open. Our task is to come up with as many ideas as we can and test what will actually stick. Prototypes pave the way to a solid, working product, and patient input on prototypes can be used in countless safe, thoughtful ways.

Recently, we worked on a digital therapeutic that helps people manage the tremors associated with motor disabilities such as Parkinson’s Disease. Instead of the typical treatment, which solely relies on an oral medication known to have serious side effects, we were tasked with working on a software and hardware system that delivers targeted electric pulses to the part of the brain that calms tremors. We began with a long list of open questions about what patients living with Parkinson’s would find acceptable, usable, and engaging.

When we went into the field to interview patients, we quickly realized that they had no idea what it might be like to rely every day on a digital device that’s crucial to their health. They were curious about the inner workings of the therapy, and asked questions about the technical, logistical, and philosophical implications.

Our first prototypes included a dozen hats, headbands, or pillows that a patient might wear to charge the implanted device. We also prototyped many digital interactions, from Alexa add-ons to iPhone apps, that might guide them to administer digital medication. To take advantage of bio-monitoring data, we created numerous dashboards, exports, and communication portals that might help patients, providers, and caretakers make sense of what was happening neurologically.

A lot of those ideas were failures, but the things we learned were priceless. For example, it turns out that despite the growing number of retirees on Alexa, many of our patients didn’t trust a voice-controlled app with a task this important. It also turns out that the headgear a person needed to wear could easily make them feel embarrassed, unattractive, or emasculated. One of the most important discoveries was that faster charging is not better, if slower charging meant you could fold laundry, watch your favorite TV show, or weed the garden at the same time. At the end of the day, we designed a hundred prototypes before we landed on the key value propositions, features, and usability standards that would shape the experience.

Tying it all together

Breakthrough products and experiences like Click Therapeutics and Headspace all align with the framework outlined above. But to be clear: They aren’t successful because they have a silver bullet for engagement or the best theory of behavioral economics. They are market-movers because they focused on their users and designed their products around what they found. That led to creating something people love, and success quickly followed. It’s a formula you can apply to creating your own digital therapeutics—or any product you want users to love enough to use in their daily lives.

Illustrations by Nien-Ken Alec Lu.

The next era of digital health has arrived, and it’s booming.

I help organizations cut through complexity by shaping how they show up, through brand strategy, identity, and storytelling.

Working at the intersection of brand and business, I bring an editorial eye and a bias toward making—turning ideas into tangible experiences that people can understand, trust, and believe in.

My work spans government, healthcare, financial services, media, and consumer goods, from launching Gen Z-focused ventures to building innovation labs and reimagining legacy brands. I relish moments of ambiguity and enjoy translating across teams, perspectives, and priorities to move ideas forward.

I started my career in editorial and digital design, shaping cross-platform experiences and identity systems in publishing and agency environments. That foundation still shapes how I work today: I’m detail-oriented, collaborative, and overreliant on the Oxford comma. I hold a BFA in Visual Communication from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For 25 years, I've asked the same question: Who does this design exclude—and what are we going to do about it?

My work spans human-centered strategy, inclusive design, and qualitative research, with clients ranging from Microsoft, Google, and Verizon to the National Science Foundation, and San Francisco Unified School District.

Before IDEO, I taught elementary school in East Palo Alto and spent a decade doing design work with social service organizations—where I learned firsthand what it costs people when systems are built without them in mind.

I am currently writing User Error, a nonfiction book about digital access and the design decisions behind it. I live in Oakland, California.

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My expertise spans brand, communication, and product design across tech, education, the arts, and social impact.

I believe great work demands both high-level vision and obsessive attention to detail, and only happens through collaboration.

I bring an inclusive, hands-on approach and a deep understanding of business, which enables me to consistently deliver excellence while always asking why.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at the brand firms Pentagram and VSA Partners. I began my career as a designer, leading teams at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum. I hold an MFA in graphic design from Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA in communication design from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, and have taught at some of the best design schools in the US.

I am responsible for IDEO’s long-term success in China and working with clients to use design as a tool to enable growth. Specifically, I have helped Chinese companies design holistic brand solutions through the development of their products, communication, services, and innovation teams, and I have helped multinationals expand their presence and influence in China.

I advise global leaders on developing China-led innovation and capabilities.

In over 15 years in IDEO Shanghai, I have worked on projects that use design to elevate the quality of the experience of healthcare products and services, streamline processes that increase productivity, create spaces and programs that promote and enable inclusive communities, and build next generation mobility solutions that are planet-positive.

Before joining IDEO, I worked at Philips Electronics and the Electrolux Group in Italy, the Netherlands, and Singapore on a number of breakthrough commercial products. I am a member of the Young President Organization in Shanghai.