Simplifying Healthcare in the U.S. Through Telehealth

Background

Peppermint began as a bold vision to take on and simplify healthcare access in the U.S. an industry regularly dominated by complexity, confusion, and hidden costs.

As the founding product designer, I led the end-to-end experience from discovery to delivery. Working in close collaboration with the idea founder, CTO, and two full stack engineers, we took the idea from initial concept to MVP in just under 8 weeks. This included customer interviews, rapid market research, wireframing, usability testing, and building a validated prototype that clearly demonstrated value to early adopters.

Problem Statement

For many Americans, healthcare is unaffordable, overly complex, and difficult to access. In 2021, approximately 27 million people lacked health insurance (Source) and an estimated 52 million are underinsured, meaning their plans did not cover local doctor visits (Source). With around 700 health insurance companies in the U.S., most doctors only accept between 10 to 20 of them on average, limiting patient options even further.

As a result, patients face long wait times, high medical bills, and limited provider availability, forcing them to either delay care or turn to expensive alternatives like emergency rooms for non-life threatening conditions and creating bottlenecks in the system.

Key Achievements

Positive user sentiment during usability testing gave us strong feedback and added confidence in our market validation efforts.

In the second round of usability tests, task completion rates were notably high and with very low error rates compared to first round.

Launched during the COVID-19 pandemic, Peppermint experienced accelerated adoption as users turned to online healthcare solutions.

Talking to People

To reduce risk and avoid wasted efforts, I wanted to tap into discovery and captured real user insights, and since none of us had prior experience with the U.S. healthcare system, it would have been presumptuous to deliver a solution to a problem I never personally faced. I took this approach to understand the customer better, and also plan our roadmap around features that would be most valuable. So reached out to Americans and interviewed them. The goal was to understand what people currently do about their health, how they feel about their situation, and what they truly want going forward.

Target Users

Lower and Middle class U.S Citizens / Residents from all ages.

Doctors of all Professions.

People with and without health insurance.

Strategy & Action Plan

Using insights from user interviews and follow-up questionnaires, I applied the Jobs to Be Done framework to uncover what people were actually trying to accomplish when dealing with healthcare. This helped us focus on the core goals, like finding a trusted and recommended doctor, seeing prices upfront, and booking appointments for both virtual and in-person with ease. These real life cases became the foundation for our initial features and roadmap, ensuring we built around actual user needs, not assumptions.

Shaping the MVP

After bringing in all the insights from talking to users, as a team we then shifted focus on execution and worked our way into defining what MVP0 would look like and the Jobs to be done was instrumental for this.

The high-level product plan consisted of:

Core user flows (onboarding → doctor discovery → booking → payment)

MVP feature set (video/in-person consultations, transparent pricing)

Early doctor onboarding via integrations with tools like Calendly, Stripe, Twilio, and Airtable

HIPAA-compliant infrastructure using trusted third-party tools

As a team we used an Impact vs Effort Matrix to prioritize features and mapped a lean roadmap from prototype to early landing page launch and usability testing.

Wireframing

At this stage in the process, velocity mattered. Design began to block engineering from moving forward, yet I still needed to test small and iterate and to avoid costly mistakes down the line. I had to prioritize what to wireframe and not spend too much time wireframing the whole app, so I focused on imporatant user touch points;

Onboarding flow

Finding a doctor

The goal was to observe behavior, gauge flow clarity, and identify any major friction points early.

Observing Users through Usability Testing

As I moved into building high-fidelity prototypes for the patient app, we made it a priority to keep testing and refining based on real user behavior. We conducted two rounds of usability testing, both focused on high-fidelity mocks to simulate the final experience as closely as possible.

Final UI Highlights

Here are some key screens in the user journey that captures the symptom form, virtual visit flow and booking confirmation. These flows were the bedrock for MVP 0 & MVP 1 release, and was the most used feature especially during covid-19 lockdown.

Brand Direction

Peppermint’s visual style was made to stand out from the typical look of healthcare apps. At first, choosing a bright, bold purple as the main brand color raised some doubts among stakeholders, but once it was applied in app and on the brand, they quickly supported the direction.

I paired the purple with strong green buttons and clear call-to-actions that stood out and helped users move through the app easily. This led to better results, like faster task completion and higher success rates. Purple also represents creativity, trust, and fresh ideas—making it a perfect match for a company aiming to modernize healthcare in a smart, tech-friendly way.