Designed the patient mobile app that closed the last mile for independent eye doctors.
- Role
- Product Designer
- Duration
- May–Nov 2025
- Team
- VPP, Design Lead, Senior Designer, dev team 3 continents
- Tools
Figma
V0 by Vercel
ChatGPT
Perplexity
Loom
Why iDoc needed a better patient experience
Eye care clinics lose contact lens sales to Amazon. iDoc had six months to change that.
The largest US alliance of independent eye doctors needed a HIPAA-compliant, prescription-aware e-commerce system: doctor portal + patient mobile app. Their competitor had over a decade head start. We delivered V1 in six months. I led the patient app Self-managed, designed, and shipped for the first three.
Three things standing in the way
A decade-old market leader with a massive head start
HIPAA-compliant prescription verification at scale
Patients with no visibility into their own prescription data
The staff-facing order interface iDoc relied on before the patient app
Research that shaped the product
The real users were front-desk staff, not the doctors
The VP of Product ran moderated testing sessions with practice staff and patients. One front-desk coordinator (who placed orders daily) became the clearest signal for what needed to change.
Staff logged into four systems to complete one order. Family defaults saved the last patient who ordered, requiring manual corrections. Duplicate carts caused errors. Patients had no visibility into their own prescriptions.
“Hallelujah.”
“That was amazing. Fantastic.”
Early FigJam brainstorming, working through the complex checkout flow that had to sync with the doctor’s desktop app
Journey map tracing the full experience from staff profile creation through patient checkout. View full PDF
What I Shipped
01 · Patient mobile app
Prescription-aware dashboard with real-time validity and sync.
Prescription dashboard with color-coded badges, supply bars, and 3-state validity logic (valid, expiring, expired).
Real-time staff-patient sync: create a checkout, patient notified. Patient changes quantity, staff sees it live.
Skeleton loading, toast confirmations, and 30-second error retry keep trust intact.
02 · Family ordering
One account. The whole household.
Named sub-patient profiles with their own prescription cards and order history.
No multi-account architecture needed — caregivers manage the whole household without juggling logins.
Patient mobile app: dashboard with prescription status, prescription management, and checkout
The $5 Constraint
$5 in V0 credits. Twelve checkout iterations. The team found out later.
When V0 credits ran out, I built a personal prototyping environment (Project Bits, using Figma Make) to test five-plus checkout flows without burning budget. Stretched $5 across12+ feature iterations. The team only realized once decisions were already faster.
“Without Vercel, we wouldn't have had alignment at the leadership level to have confidence to say V1 is going to be good.”
Project Bits, the private prototyping environment that stretched $5 across 12+ iterations
A new brand arrived two weeks before we shipped
An acquisition brought a completely new identity. I applied it across every screen without delaying dev handoff.
Two weeks before final designs, an acquisition brought a completely new brand identity and style guide.
I mapped every updated design token across every patient screen (colors, typography, components) and tested across every state: loading, error, empty, success. Worked with the design system owner to keep both apps visually cohesive through the transition.
The original timeline held. No delay to dev handoff. The final designs were better for it.
Three brand identities. Five months. Same timeline.
From color system to color system: three brand identities in five months
Fun fact
The product name changed over five times throughout the process — from Fern, to Olive, to Indigo, and finally to Bridge.
Outcomes
Delivered a month early. Live, in patients’ hands.
- 01
Delivered 1 month early, live at idocbridge.com
- 02
Target: 60%+ of pilot clinic patients complete first purchase in-app (vs. 0% previously)
- 03
Target: 40% reduction in staff checkout creation time
- 04
Target: 80%+ of first-time users complete checkout independently
What I learned designing my first healthcare product
The constraints were real. The prototype-first approach carried us through.
My first healthcare product. The constraints: limited budget, a back injury mid-project, a brand change two weeks before finalization, a dev team in a different time zone.
What I’d do differently: push for analytics access earlier. We shipped without instrumentation, so I can’t measure what I designed. A gap I’m carrying into the next project.
What worked: the prototype-first approach. By the time requirements were written, the team had already reacted to something real. That collapsed weeks of alignment into days.
Real Talk
The product is live at idocbridge.com. No direct user access for months. The analytics dashboard didn’t make V1. My white-label work is in the V2 backlog.
That is product design. Make good decisions within real constraints, keep the team moving, ship something that works, even when it isn’t everything you originally designed.
One staff member said “Hallelujah” the first time she saw the prototype work. That is enough.
Want a walkthrough?
Visit the live product, or get in touch and I’ll talk you through the design decisions, including the ones that didn’t make it to ship.
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