Case study · Product
Guidance & Education
An in-app content library of short, illustrated lessons on wound care, swelling, safe movement, and recovery precautions, assigned by a therapist alongside a patient's exercise program.
Live in the patient app today · Guidance, 5 lessons
Where it started
Our Head of Product and I landed on the idea in a conversation. He followed up with a proposal to the team. From there, I picked it up with our design lead to build the first mockups. Leadership later pulled a set of those mockups into a fundraising deck.
Concept and prototyping
I built the first working screens as a weekly-unlock structure. Patients progressed through their recovery, completed lessons, and returned to the week view. I also worked with the design lead on the illustration style and content rules that helped the modules feel consistent. The screens below show that structure, from the week view through to a completed lesson.
Extended prototype · Weekly list through to a completed lesson
Scoping the MVP
The weekly structure raised a practical issue. Someone would need to define what each week contained and decide when it unlocked. Asking therapists to configure that for every patient would add too much work to the first release.
We kept the model closer to something the product already supported. Clinicians could assign ordered lessons in the same general way they assigned exercises, a structure that was fast to ship and simple enough for the team to reason about as it scaled.
Solving the content-conversion bottleneck
Clinics supplied many existing handouts, and their formats varied. Building each lesson by hand would not scale, while fixed conversion code struggled with the differences between files.
I used an AI prompt workflow to turn source material and design exports into clean, self-contained HTML. The team could then review the result before publishing it as a lesson. The lesson shown here is one of the first to go through that pipeline.
Building and shipping it
Once the concept was approved for a real build, I carried it through myself, turning my own mockups into production code and writing the sprint checklist that coordinated backend, web, mobile, and testing around it. The screens below show where that work landed and how it's evolved since: the two on the left are from the original release, and the two on the right are from the current Lessons tab inside the redesigned Library.
Outcome, and where it is headed
The feature launched to a pilot clinic before expanding to more clinics. It now has a structured content workflow, review steps, and a growing lesson library. The 1,600+ figure records lessons marked as read. It does not measure comprehension or clinical improvement. The MVP gave the business something concrete to evaluate: real clinic usage, not just a concept. That's what shaped the decision to keep investing in it.
What I'd take from it
The real constraint on this project was never technical. It was clinician effort. A weekly-unlock structure looked better on paper, but it would have asked every clinician to configure content on a schedule, work the product wasn't ready to support at scale. Recognizing that early, because I was close to both the design and the eventual implementation, is what let us ship something simple enough to learn from instead of something impressive that never got adopted.