In the healthcare space, patient engagement is often challenging due to low trust in messaging, complex healthcare terminology, and a lack of personalized communication. Nilo Capta was designed to address these issues by creating a healthcare engagement platform focused on trust and relevance, ultimately helping patients feel secure and informed while encouraging active participation in their care journey.
As the Senior Product Designer, I worked closely with the Product Manager to plan our first steps and ensure alignment with the product vision. I was responsible for planning and facilitating a Design Sprint with the team, which included inviting specialists to provide expertise, recruiting outside users for real-world testing, and synthesizing feedback. Additionally, I collaborated with our UX Researcher, bringing more context to the Design Sprint and leveraging key findings from her previous research to inform our decisions. After all, we were building everything from scratch, and even writing the very messages our patients would receive.
Senior Product Designer
• Design Sprint facilitator
• User Interviewing
• Benchmarking research
• Synced on specs with Engineers & PM
• UX/UI Design
• User Testing
• Design QA
Product Manager
Product Marketing Manager
UX Researcher
5 Software Engineers
1 QA Engineer
6 months
Understanding Nilo Care
Our flagship care navigation product, Nilo Care, relies on a proprietary chat tool that operates through WhatsApp. This allows us to communicate with patients directly while adhering to Meta’s messaging policies. However, it was originally designed for 1:1 interactions. We were now planning on reaching larger patient groups (we call them Populations), and raised these concerns that needed to be addressed:
1. One-on-one messaging only: Users can engage with individual patients but cannot send messages to groups or broader patient populations;
2. Manual population targeting: To contact multiple patients, users must first search for each patient individually and initiate a one-on-one chat;
3. Messaging restrictions: If the 24-hour WhatsApp messaging window has expired, users are restricted to sending pre-approved template messages (we can send custom open-text messages to patients up to 24 hours after we received their last message);
4. Scalability issues: The current setup is not scalable for reaching, engaging, and converting larger audiences, especially when dealing with population-based health initiatives.
Understanding patients’ needs
We began by conducting foundational research to learn about our target audience: patients unfamiliar with primary healthcare (APS - Atenção Primária à Saúde). This research, led by our UX Researcher, provided essential insights like:
1. Patients had doubts about healthcare messaging;
2. They were cautious about data privacy;
3. Did not understand what APS was and how it could benefit them;
4. Uncertainty about being charged additional fees for the service.
These findings highlighted the need for a product that not only engaged patients but also helped them feel safe and informed.
From Design Sprint to OKRs
To translate our insights into actionable goals, I led a Design Sprint with cross-functional participation, involving stakeholders, healthcare experts, and the product team. The sprint enabled us to align on the key requirements from both a business and patient perspective. We focused on several core questions, including how to create a patient-friendly, non-intrusive experience, and how to design the platform to adapt to patient needs over time.
After the sprint, we gathered everything we learned, organized feedback into categories, and began prioritizing features that would deliver the most impact. I teamed up with the Product Manager and led the team in identifying the high-level objectives, which included creating personalized, trust-centered communication that was proactive and highly relevant to patients. This prioritization work was critical for focusing our design and development efforts on features that would genuinely resonate with users.
Before moving into designing UI and journeys, I conducted a benchmarking study to explore existing products similar to what we envisioned for Nilo Capta. At the time, we couldn’t find any solutions that shared the same value proposition and were exclusively tailored for the healthcare industry. The tools we found were generic CRM platforms that could be adapted for healthcare but were not purpose-built for this market. This lack of direct competition reinforced our belief in the uniqueness and potential impact of Nilo Capta.
With a clear direction, we refined our OKRs to reflect our objectives. After presenting and validating these OKRs with Nilo’s leadership team, we received the go-ahead to start building Nilo Capta, aligned with Nilo’s long-term strategy and vision.
Building Nilo Capta
Guided by our research findings and insights, we begin designing a patient engagement platform that centered on trust and relevance. The system was built to:
The proposed workflow was constantly aligned with the team for fine tuning, and framing with higher accuracy what would be shipped in our MVP and the following updates.
When the interfaces were designed, we built a few high fidelity prototypes and tested them with different audiences: health professionals, business analysts, and managers. We gathered their feedback, fine-tuned some details, and added others to our precious backlog: we knew what should be built in the future and what value each feature would unlock. After going live, getting real user feedback, and understanding the market's response to the product, it could be prioritized in the appropriate moment.
User and Business Impact
Nilo Capta was successful in increasing patient activation rates and building user trust. Our clients were able to engage patients more effectively without overwhelming them, increase the number of active patients in the product, which led to an increase in our MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue).
Strategic Influence
The new product established a cornerstone in Nilo’s engagement strategy, setting a precedent for a new feature that would be built for incorporating Scheduled Messages into care lines, that would be sent to patients when they've met specific points of their continuous care.
Business case presented by Conexa at Nilo Digital Health Summit 2023.
Results after reaching out to 19.000 patients in multiple channels:
This project showed me the power of a research-driven and collaborative approach to product design. As the lead designer, I sharpened my skills in client-focused engagement and cross-functional teamwork, creating a balance between user needs and business goals. It became a cornerstone example of how discovery, user research, testing, and iteration can lead to meaningful innovation in healthcare engagement.
Later that year, when we launched Nilo Capta, most of our team members (myself included) received recognition awards at the company’s annual offsite. It was the perfect ending to a year of hard work—a testament to a team that stayed close, supported one another, and worked in harmony to achieve something impactful.
