CASE STUDY

The Eight-Minute Appointment

Ask our users to name the hardest moment in their cancer journey and many describe the same scene: a rushed visit with an oncologist, a blur of words they don't understand, and the parking lot afterward where they realize they forgot to ask the one thing that mattered. This is how we designed for that moment.

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Please bear with me while I get these draft case studies refined. They are a work in progress, but they are here in draft form to give you a general sense of my work while I finish up!

Head of Design · Manta Cares · 2026

The Problem

The constraint that shaped everything: a real appointment at a community clinic can be eight minutes long. The oncologist is moving fast. The patient is frightened, possibly just got hard news, and is trying to listen, remember, and ask good questions all at once — a near-impossible cognitive task. Whatever we built had to work inside those eight minutes and the anxious hours on either side of them, not in some idealized calm that doesn't exist.

I broke the problem into a three-act ritual — before, during, and after — because that's how the moment actually unfolds, and because each act has a completely different design constraint.

Principle 1

Prepare Her Before She Walks In

The best way to survive a fast appointment is to walk in already knowing what you need from it. So the "before" act is about turning a swirl of fear into a small set of focused questions.

I designed the prep flow as a brain-dump funnel: let the patient pour out everything she's worried about, unstructured, and then help her narrow that into the two or three things actually worth the doctor's limited time. The structure deliberately mirrors the arc of a real visit, so the prep doubles as a mental rehearsal. We packaged this thinking two ways: a patient-facing prep template (designed as a printable PDF for users who'd rather bring paper into the room) and the internal design rationale behind it for the team.

In the product, this became real: Hope now helps users prepare for appointments with personalized guidance, and rather than dumping a wall of text, that guidance arrives as a structured, interactive widget right inside the chat — something she can actually scan and act on.

Principle 2

Let Her Capture Without Looking Down

The "during" act has the cruelest constraint of all: anything that makes the patient stare at her phone makes her miss what the doctor is saying. The design problem isn't "build a note field" — it's "help someone capture a fast, jargon-heavy conversation while staying present in it."

I explored the most ambitious version of this: voice capture, recording or transcribing the conversation so she wouldn't have to write at all. That pushed us straight into hard, honest constraints — HIPAA-compliant transcription options and the realities of background audio capture on iOS — and the exploration was as much about what's responsible to build as what's possible. Even for typed notes, the medical vocabulary fights you: phone keyboards autocorrect terms like Herceptin and neutropenia into nonsense, so the design work included taming autocorrect for specialized terminology and surfacing the right medical terms instead of mangling them.

This is also where the care partner becomes essential. In a lot of visits, the most realistic capture plan is simply: the daughter takes the notes. So we designed a defined scribe role rather than pretending the patient can do everything herself. What shipped first is the dependable foundation — users can create, edit, and delete their own notes — with the richer capture explorations layered on top of that base.

Principle 3

Make Sure the Notes Survive the Visit

The "after" act is about consolidation — turning the mess captured in the room into something she can actually use, and making sure the useful things don't evaporate the moment she leaves.

The key design move was connecting capture to the companion. A patient can now save a Hope response straight into a note, so when Hope explains what "hormone-positive" means in plain language, that explanation lives in her records instead of scrolling away. And because so much of cancer care is paper, we shipped document upload — the folder of lab results and instructions can come into the app and become something Hope can help interpret, including the unglamorous reliability work of handling very large documents gracefully.

The throughline across all three acts is continuity: prep, capture, and recall should feel like one connected ritual, not three disconnected tools she has to remember to use.

Conclusions

Designing for the eight-minute appointment meant accepting the moment as it really is — rushed, frightening, shared with a second person — and building a ritual that meets it on those terms.