SaMD

In 2025, U.S. regulators finalized a new pathway that lets certain prescription-only treatments move to over-the-counter access, on one condition: the buyer has to complete a digital eligibility check first. No prior product had shipped against this pathway. There was no established pattern to borrow from. I joined a two-designer team for a 14-week sprint to take the concept from a research review through a usability-tested, engineering-ready prototype.

The brief was to turn a dense, compliance-driven feature backlog, identity verification, a medical self-check, an eligibility outcome, a one-time purchase code, into a flow a first-time user could get through calmly and correctly, on the first try, without a support call.

The regulation was five months old when the sprint started. Every product decision had to be inferred from a raw requirements backlog, translated from compliance language into something a stressed, self-conscious user could actually complete.

What the Backlog Demanded

• Full identity verification with two-factor authentication and account recovery, before the user ever reaches the reason they came.
• A multi-step medical self-check that has to read like a private conversation, not an interrogation, while still capturing everything a regulator requires.
• An eligibility outcome that has to be immediately actionable: approved, ask a doctor first, or not eligible, each with a different next step.
• A one-time purchase code that has to work for both an in-store and an online purchase, without the user ever feeling unsure whether it worked.
• WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility and strict privacy handling threaded through every screen, not bolted on at the end.

Discovery started with a competitive read across telehealth and self-serve health platforms, membership-gated clinician tools, subscription wellness quizzes, pharmacy coupon and retail tie-ins, to see how the space commonly handles eligibility gating, onboarding, and purchase redemption, and where each one broke down.

What the Competitive Read Showed

• Most platforms picked one purchase channel, either fully online or routed entirely through a partner pharmacy, and never solved for handing a user cleanly between both.
• Waiting periods for clinical approval were universal, but the products that handled it best set expectations upfront instead of leaving users refreshing a screen.
• Tools gated behind a clinician account (rather than self-serve) consistently added friction and support burden that self-serve competitors didn't have.

That last gap became the core design bet: nobody in the competitive set had cleanly solved "redeem a single-use code across two different purchase channels." That's exactly where our own first draft would go on to struggle too.

Two full prototype directions were built in parallel and tested head to head, one warm and photographic, one clean and clinical, to see which tone built more trust for a self-check about a sensitive health topic.

Moderated Usability Testing

Both directions were tested with the same moderated script, walking each participant through onboarding, the self-check survey, the eligibility outcome, and checkout, then closing with confidence and clarity ratings on a 1–7 scale so the two directions could be compared on the same terms rather than judged subjectively.

From Backlog to Sprints

The backlog was mapped into four build phases, account and onboarding, profile and privacy, the self-check flow and eligibility outcome, then prototype polish, so the highest-compliance-risk screens got the earliest and most testing.

The team delivered a working prototype of the first-time-user flow, plus full screens for both first-time and returning users, handed to engineering for build.

• A screen can be technically complete and still fail. The purchase-code screen had both purchase paths on it from the start; it failed because it made users choose between two unequal journeys without ever asking the question directly. Splitting the decision into its own screen fixed it.
• For anything a user might feel self-conscious about, removing UI chrome builds more trust than adding features. Testing that early, before investing polish into functionality nobody asked for mid-flow, saved real time later in the sprint.

This was one of the first products designed against a regulatory pathway that didn't exist a year earlier, so there was no pattern library to lean on. The highest-leverage work wasn't inventing new interaction patterns. It was being disciplined about removing anything that added friction or doubt at the two moments where a user's trust was most fragile: the self-check itself, and the moment they had to act on its result.