Engaged Media

Patient Insight Platform

TL;DR Engaged Media aimed to help pharmaceutical companies understand treatment effectiveness through branded patient surveys. As the sole Product & UX Designer, I defined the product foundation — translating complex healthcare data requirements into an intuitive, privacy-compliant platform that enabled structured data collection while protecting patient identity.

Project Overview

Engaged Media was a healthcare startup building a platform that allowed pharmaceutical companies and healthcare providers to collect patient-reported outcomes through branded surveys. The goal was to measure treatment efficacy by aggregating patient experiences into usable, compliant insights.

The challenge was balancing data accessibility with strict privacy requirements, ensuring sensitive patient information remained protected while enabling meaningful analysis across stakeholders.

Role

Sole Product & UX Designer

Responsibilities

  • User research & stakeholder interviews

  • Information architecture (IA)

  • User flows & journey mapping

  • Sketching & wireframing

  • Interaction design & prototyping strategy

The Problem

Pharmaceutical companies lacked a scalable way to understand how treatments performed in real-world conditions.

They needed a holistic view of patient treatment outcomes, including:

  • Dosage and treatment duration

  • Medication adherence

  • Comorbidities and hereditary factors

  • Concurrent medications

  • Patient-reported experiences

However, the platform also needed to:

  • Maintain HIPAA compliance

  • Protect personally identifiable information (PII)

  • Allow multiple professional audiences to access aggregated insights differently

Design Challenge:
Create an interface that preserved patient privacy while making complex healthcare metadata accessible, understandable, and actionable.

Research & Discovery

Stakeholder Interviews

The Product Owner and I conducted interviews with:

  • Pharmaceutical companies

  • Healthcare providers

Goals:

  • Identify critical data requirements

  • Understand workflows for interpreting treatment outcomes

  • Define how insights would be consumed by different users

A recurring challenge emerged: feature scope expanded rapidly as stakeholders envisioned new possibilities.

To prevent scope creep, we prioritized an MVP strategy, focusing on core value delivery first.

Patient Flow Testing

To understand patient behavior, I:

  • Created a mock survey campaign

  • Designed a simplified patient user flow

  • Tested completion tolerance with general users

Key Insight:
Survey length directly impacted completion rates. This informed decisions around:

  • Question hierarchy

  • Progressive disclosure

  • Conditional logic (parent/child questions)

We also uncovered essential campaign-building needs, including survey dependencies and branching logic.

Synthesis

Affinity Mapping

I synthesized research findings into an affinity map to:

  • Identify behavioral patterns

  • Clarify user needs

  • Define required platform tools

This process enabled me to:

  • Prioritize features

  • Structure workflows

  • Establish a scalable information architecture

The visualization helped align product decisions with real user goals rather than feature requests alone.

Information Architecture

Using research insights, I designed an IA that balanced three competing needs:

  1. Patient simplicity — frictionless survey completion

  2. Pharmaceutical insights — rich aggregated data

  3. Compliance requirements — strict separation of identity and metadata

The resulting structure separated:

  • Personal data (protected)

  • Analytical metadata (accessible)

  • Campaign configuration tools (administrative)

Design Process

Early Wireframes (Collaborative Sketching)

I began with hand-drawn wireframes to:

  • Encourage rapid iteration

  • Facilitate collaboration with the Product Manager

  • Capture brainstorming feedback in real time

This low-barrier approach accelerated decision-making before moving digital.

Lo-Fi Wireframes

After validating workflows, I translated concepts into Sketch:

  • Defined screen hierarchy

  • Established interaction patterns

  • Built initial campaign-creation flows

The focus was clarity and logical progression rather than visual polish.

And then I was able to start putting screens in Sketch.

Outcome

Before hi-fidelity prototyping and usability testing began, Engaged Media was acquired by Aptus Health, concluding the project.

However, the work established:

  • A validated product direction

  • MVP feature prioritization

  • Scalable information architecture

  • Foundational workflows for campaign creation and patient participation

Next Steps (Planned)

Had the project continued, next phases included:

  • High-fidelity wireframes

  • Interactive prototype development

  • Usability testing with pharmaceutical users

  • Iteration on the survey builder experience

  • Validation of patient completion flow

The ultimate goal was a seamless end-to-end experience enabling companies to launch campaigns easily while maintaining a low-friction patient experience.

Impact & Key Learnings

  • Designing within healthcare requires balancing usability with regulatory constraints.

  • Early research prevents exponential scope growth.

  • Structuring data is often more impactful than adding features.

  • Testing assumptions with real users early clarified both patient and enterprise needs.