Overview: A Health Companion During the Pandemic
bewell is a super app designed to offer preventive healthcare services and telehealth access during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the Design Lead and later Platform Lead, I played a key role in both product design and business strategy.
The app focused on guiding users through personalized health journeys with empathy at its core, embodied in the Care Angel feature—a virtual companion offering real-time health insights and telehealth access.
The Problem: Healthcare Accessibility and Engagement
When the pandemic hit, people needed healthcare more than ever, but accessing reliable information and services became difficult. Traditional telehealth services felt transactional and clinical. The challenge was to create a platform that brought healthcare closer to people, making it feel personal, warm, and supportive.
For more info, refer to the Strategy Deck I created.
Design Approach: Empathy at the Core
Our vision was to create not just a healthcare app, but a companion. We conducted research with patients to better understand their pain points and built our design strategy around empathy and accessibility.
The centerpiece of our design was the Care Angel, a character that is always there to guide users to the right doctors, help them to get health insights and care recommendations in a human way.
A Design That Fosters Trust
To reduce the complexity of healthcare interactions, we created UIs that allowed users to manage their health step by step. From scheduling calls to health monitoring, the UX was focused on clarity and ease of use.
The visual design focused on soft color schemes, clear typography, and friendly icons to reduce user anxiety and create a sense of trust. The Care Angel's look reinforced this, making healthcare non-intimidating and accessible.
From Prototype to Polished Product
We conducted user testings through Maze and in-person to identify misalignments and receive feedback from doctors and early users.
Our team used Figma as the central design-development collaboration tool for seamless handoff between design and engineering, which allowed us to implement design enhancements based on testing results.
Impact: From App to Healthcare Companion
Within six months, bewell facilitated 1,200 calls and received a 4.9/5 rating. Many users reported that the quality of care provided through bewell exceeded their expectations.
More importantly, we saw behavioral shifts—users began proactively scheduling more calls for generic healthcare and started trials on our Care Angel subscription packages. The app changed from a telehealth platform into a trusted companion that encouraged better health habits.
Reflection: Designing for Empathy and Leading with Vision
As I led the design team, I focused on balancing users' needs with a strategy rooted in empathy. Building a human-centered app during a critical time like COVID-19 reinforced the importance of listening to users and creating designs that genuinely solve problems.
This experience sharpened my leadership skills and my belief that design can make healthcare both personal and impactful.
Next work
