Putting it together: a map of digital health design
How the eight topic articles fit together, where they meet, and where to start for a given task: new to the field, building a product, or auditing accessibility.
Digital health design comes down to eight linked topics, each answering one thing that sets health screens apart from other software: who is reading, how much attention they have, what can go wrong, what the rules name, and how a team finds out. This article is the map. It shows how the eight fit together, where they meet, and where to start for a given task.
The eight topics on one page
Read in this order, the topics move from people, to duty, to craft, to evidence. Each link opens the full article.
- Clinical vs Patient Interfaces: the same data reaches a clinician and a patient through two different screens with different jobs.
- Health Literacy & Plain Language: people often read health information while stressed or unwell, so the words on the page are part of the care.
- Design for Vulnerable Users: design for the edge, where people have the least attention, time and confidence to spare.
- Trust, Ethics & Safety: why a screen can be a patient-safety matter, and who is accountable for it.
- Accessibility & Regulation: WCAG is the benchmark most rules point to, but the version and the legal force differ by region.
- UX Patterns for Health: reusable, tested answers to recurring problems such as forms, confirmations and errors.
- Data Visualisation & Health Metrics: what a chart, a range and a colour need to do for a busy clinician and a worried patient.
- Process & Research: testing with real patients and clinicians, not colleagues, and reporting small studies honestly.
The landscape they sit in, meaning the product types and who uses them, is in What is digital health design.
Where the topics meet
Same data, two readers. A blood-pressure reading or a lab result reaches a clinician who scans a long list, and a patient who reads one number about their own body. Clinical vs Patient Interfaces and Data Visualisation & Health Metrics treat this as one problem seen from two sides, and Health Literacy & Plain Language adds the wording. Release timing raises the stakes: where patients see results as soon as they are uploaded, as in the recent changes in the United States and Australia that the first article describes, the screen may be the only interpreter present. The Showcase card Humanising the number shows one value read both ways.
Attention is scarce. People use health services while unwell, worried, interrupted or unfamiliar with the technology, and that runs through four topics. Health Literacy & Plain Language shows how stress narrows what people take in. Design for Vulnerable Users asks for forgiving flows and a human alternative. UX Patterns for Health turns it into restraint: an interruption has to be rare or it stops working. Trust, Ethics & Safety shows the extreme case, where too many alerts lead staff to ignore the ones that matter. Alert fatigue, the pattern in which people stop responding because too many alerts arrive, shows up in several of the articles.
Thin evidence, shared duty. Much of the research these articles cite is small, from one site, or based on what people said rather than what they did. Process & Research explains how to report a small study honestly. The rules are uneven in the same way. Accessibility & Regulation shows that the instruments it read most often name WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and that 2.2 covers it because 2.2 builds on 2.1. Trust, Ethics & Safety shows responsibility split between the maker and the organisation that uses the product. Treat guidance as a place to start, and check it with your own users and your own team.
Three focus areas, one set of topics
The three focus-area articles apply the topics to a context. Each ends with a short list of where to read next, and the first entries show which topics it leans on:
- Remote Patient Monitoring & Wearables starts with Clinical vs Patient Interfaces, Data Visualisation & Health Metrics and Trust, Ethics & Safety, because care happens away from the clinic while data keeps arriving.
- Patient Portal & EHR Redesign starts with Clinical vs Patient Interfaces, Health Literacy & Plain Language and Trust, Ethics & Safety, because simpler clinical workflows must not become less safe.
- Accessibility & Health Literacy Design starts with Health Literacy & Plain Language, Accessibility & Regulation and Design for Vulnerable Users, because both barriers, services people cannot operate and services they cannot understand, lock people out of care.
Start from your task
The lists below point to content that already exists on this site. Pick the one closest to what you are doing.
If you are new to the field
- Start with What is digital health design for the landscape: product types, who uses them and why it differs from general product design.
- Then read Clinical vs Patient Interfaces and Health Literacy & Plain Language, the two topics about who reads a health screen and how they read it.
- Then read Trust, Ethics & Safety for why a screen can be a safety matter.
- Then look at one worked example: Humanising the number, a lab result shown with and without its reference range.
- Keep the Principles page open as a quick reference.
If you are designing or building a health product now
- Run the Digital health DESIGN checklist. It is a design-craft check, not a compliance one.
- Read UX Patterns for Health for forms, confirmations and errors.
- Read the focus-area article closest to your product: remote monitoring, patient portal and record system, or accessibility and health literacy.
- Find the nearest Showcase card. The error summary covers a form that has gone wrong, and Write the dose the patient reads, not the dose the chart stores covers medication screens.
- Read Process & Research before you test with patients or clinicians.
If you are auditing accessibility
- Start with Accessibility & Regulation for what WCAG 2.2 added and how rules in different regions refer to it.
- Use the regulation map to see which instrument names which standard in your region.
- Check the screen against the Showcase cards on the same criteria: Status is never colour alone, Target Size (Minimum), Accessible sign-in and No re-typing the same data.
- Use the accessibility checkpoint in the checklist, and the tools in the Library, such as the WCAG quick reference, the WebAIM contrast checker and WAVE. They are a first pass, not a full audit.
Pick your region
- Australia: DDA and healthcare accessibility and My Health Record sharing by default.
- United States: Healthcare accessibility lawsuits.
- The United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Australia side by side: the regulation map.