NTU PaCE · UX Design & Digital Product Management · 2026
Academic capstone · Concept study, not a commissioned or shipped HealthHub feature
The result was visible. The meaning wasn't.
Health portals can show lab results immediately, but clinical shorthand can still leave caregivers and patients asking a basic question: what does this actually mean? My capstone focused on that moment of confusion rather than redesigning the whole product.
- 76
- survey responses
- 10
- research interviews
- 32
- caregivers in the survey sample
- 13
- Maze usability-test participants
The gap
Every unexplained result can become an exit from the product.
Result appears
A caregiver or patient sees a lab result inside the health portal.
Term is unfamiliar
Clinical shorthand such as HbA1c appears without enough plain-language context.
App is abandoned
The user leaves the flow to search the term elsewhere.
Search adds noise
Different sources, terminology and risk framing can create more uncertainty.
Next step is unclear
The result is visible, but the user still has to decide what it means and what to do.
Research signal
The request was not “give me more features.” It was “help me understand this.”
of caregivers in the primary research sample reported Googling unfamiliar medical terms after viewing results
Directional sample signal, not a population estimate.of interview participants asked for plain-language explanations without being prompted
10 interviews were conducted in the capstone research.survey respondents identified as caregivers, so caregiver-specific findings were filtered to that group
Sample quality changed the priorities more than raw sample size.“I feel there should be an information icon I can tap to find out what that particular test actually means.”
Caregiver interview participant
Key product decision
The most important screen was the one I decided not to design.
Medical literacy
Every interview surfaced the comprehension problem. It had meaningful stakes, could be addressed at the interface layer, and gave the project a clear before-and-after behaviour to test.
- Repeated, unprompted pain point
- Comprehension and trust implications
- UI-solvable within capstone scope
- Measurable through task testing
Appointment booking
A capacity and operations problem. Better screens cannot create more appointment slots.
Profile switching
Touches authentication and security flows, which pushed it beyond this capstone scope.
Multilingual overhaul
A valuable direction, but one that requires larger content, governance and infrastructure investment.
help caregivers and patients understand lab results without ever leaving the app?
The solution
One tap. Context where the confusion already is.
Clinical terms are made visibly tappable. The user opens a plain-language explanation without losing the lab-result context or opening an external search.HbA1c
Shows your average blood sugar level over the past 2–3 months. Used to diagnose and monitor diabetes.
Product dependency: the interaction is simple; the medical content is not. Any production version would need clinical review, content governance, accessible wording and a clear boundary between explanation and diagnosis.
Round-one validation
The concept worked. Discoverability still needed work.
Participants were asked to find the clinical term HbA1c and understand its meaning. Seven in ten completed the task successfully on their first attempt in the unmoderated Maze test.
The misses were useful. Several participants struggled to find the lab-results path or recognise what was tappable. That points to a discoverability and information- architecture problem to fix in the next iteration, not a reason to add more features.
What I learned
Good product judgement is often subtraction.
UX cannot fix what is not a UX problem.
Appointment scarcity and infrastructure constraints were real, but outside the interface team’s direct control.
Sample quality beats a bigger headline number.
Filtering caregiver-specific findings to the 32 relevant survey respondents materially changed the priorities.
Small interventions can carry serious value.
An inline explanation is not a dramatic redesign. That is precisely why it is plausible as an MVP.
Discoverability is part of comprehension.
If users cannot find the result or recognise the affordance, good explanatory content never gets a chance to help.
From concept to product
The next work is governance, edge cases and better testing.
Refine & align
- Tighten the flow from research and Maze findings
- Clinical/content review and taxonomy
- Define analytics events and success metrics
Build MVP
- Use real lab-result data
- Cover edge cases and accessibility
- Run an internal alpha
Pilot & iterate
- Pilot with caregivers and seniors
- Run moderated usability tests
- Refine guidance, microcopy and navigation
Scale & govern
- Expand to more result types
- Create a content-governance workflow
- Measure comprehension and external-search exits
Portfolio context
A capstone, not a claim that HealthHub shipped it.
This project is useful in my portfolio because it shows a different kind of design evidence: primary research, problem selection, scope boundaries, prototype logic, first-round usability testing and reflection.
It also shows where my established systems background transfers cleanly into product work: deciding what has to stay consistent, what can change, and what the design team should deliberately leave alone.