Tendo

Most patient-facing healthcare apps fall well short of the consumer apps people use every day. For someone managing a complex diagnosis, that gap is costly. Their care spans years, dozens of appointments, and test results they're often left to interpret on their own.

Tendo set out to build a patient app that felt simple, empathetic, and personal.

We designed for the hardest case first: patients with breast cancer, whose care is long, complex, and heavily documented. Interviews with them surfaced two needs:

Their history goes with them. Appointments keep asking about past treatments, and many patients keep paper binders of their care history to answer.

Results are hard to read. “When I get a new lab result, I need to know what it means and what its implications are for the future.” Some patients joined social media groups partly to ask strangers what their results meant.

From there I sketched and prototyped, and tested early versions directly with breast cancer patients.

Care Journey. After several rounds of sketches and prototypes, we landed on a timeline. It shows upcoming appointments in the context of past care, so patients see the whole picture. It also gives reminders and action items a place in the app, not just in push notifications. Search and filters let patients find any past visit, treatment, or result quickly.

Lab Results. I designed one chart flexible enough for many kinds of tests, readable at a glance, and fully accessible. It shows results over time so patients can track their progress.

In user testing, the lab results chart was read effortlessly by 11/12 test subjects. Several participants said, without being asked, that they wished their own lab results looked like this.