I’ve always found it interesting how we collect information with the expectation that it’ll be useful someday. Receipts go into drawers. Important documents live in folders. Screenshots become accidental archives of things we promised ourselves we’d revisit. Medical records are no different, except the stakes are considerably higher.
While working with the team on Pushpa, a family healthcare product, we spoke with people living with chronic conditions through LinkedIn outreach and visits to hospitals and old-age homes. One thing that stayed with me was how many people relied on large physical folders to organize their medical histories. Prescriptions, lab reports, scans, and documents from previous appointments were all collected in one place. Technically, the information was there. But retrieving a particular report could be difficult.
And finding the document wasn’t necessarily the end of the problem. Many people struggled to interpret what was written inside it. A report might contain dozens of measurements, unfamiliar abbreviations, and clinical terms. For someone without a medical background, having access to that information didn’t automatically mean understanding it. That distinction changed how I thought about designing the interface.
A digital folder is still a folder.
When we move a physical experience into a digital product, it’s tempting to assume we’ve solved the problem simply because everything is now searchable or stored in one place.
But a beautifully organized collection of incomprehensible documents is still difficult to use. For Pushpa’s mobile UI, I focused on creating clearer document layouts, recognizable previews, and health summaries that presented information in more manageable layers. Instead of treating every medical detail with equal visual importance, the interface needed to help people establish context first. What condition am I looking at? Which measurement matters here? Has it changed? Where can I find the original report? This connects to a familiar principle in interaction design: people generally find it easier to recognize something when given visual cues than to recall it from memory. A document thumbnail, recognizable date, or descriptive label might appear like a tiny design detail. But together, those details can change how much effort it takes to navigate information.
The Files screen in Pushpa’s mobile UI.
Clarity is a form of care.
The experience also made me more cautious about the word simple. In healthcare, simplifying something too aggressively can remove information that matters. A clean interface isn’t necessarily an understandable one, and an understandable interface isn’t automatically medically reliable. The challenge is to present the right information at the right level, while preserving access to the underlying detail and making uncertainty visible.
I think that’s what makes information design so interesting. Sometimes the most meaningful design work isn’t creating a new feature. It’s making an existing piece of information easier for someone to find, interpret, or discuss with the person who can help them.
My biggest takeaway: Access to information is only the first step. Designing for understanding is where the real work begins.
