So here I am, sitting in my favorite coffee shop (you know, the one with the overpriced lattes and the barista who judges your drink order), when I get this email that made me nearly spit out my cortado.
DesignRush wants to collaborate with us. THE DesignRush. You know, those folks who basically decide what’s cool in the design world and make the rest of us feel either incredibly validated or completely inadequate depending on whether we make their lists.
Apparently, their expert team of designers has been keeping tabs on our work here at DesignLion. And get this, they want to feature our healthcare project Medly in their upcoming article about The Best User Experience Designs. I had to read that email three times just to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating from too much caffeine.
For those who don’t know Medly (where have you been living, under a digital rock?), it’s this healthcare platform we designed that actually makes scheduling doctor appointments feel less like navigating a government website from 1999. Revolutionary stuff, I know. We somehow managed to create a user experience that doesn’t make people want to throw their phones across the room when they’re trying to book a simple checkup.
The DesignRush team reached out because they’re putting together this massive feature on user experience designs that don’t suck. Okay, they didn’t use those exact words, but that’s basically what they meant. They’ve been scouring the internet, looking at thousands of projects, and apparently our little healthcare baby caught their attention.
What’s funny is that when we were designing Medly, we had about seventeen different versions that looked like they were designed by someone who had never used the internet before. But that’s the beauty of good design, it’s usually the result of throwing away a lot of bad design. Kind of like how I write these blog posts, actually. You should see my drafts folder. It’s a graveyard of terrible jokes and half-formed thoughts.
The collaboration they’re proposing sounds pretty exciting. They want to showcase not just the final product, but the whole journey, the research, the user testing, the moments when we thought we’d never figure out how to make a medical appointment booking system that didn’t feel like doing your taxes.
What I love about this is that DesignRush gets it. They understand that great user experience design isn’t just about making things look pretty (though let’s be honest, we do make things look pretty). It’s about solving real problems for real people. In Medly’s case, it was solving the problem of why booking a doctor’s appointment should be harder than landing a rocket on Mars.
Their expert team apparently spent considerable time analyzing our approach to information architecture, user flow optimization, and accessibility features. Fancy words that basically mean we made sure people could actually use the thing without needing a PhD in computer science.
The upcoming article is going to be huge. We’re talking about a feature that gets seen by thousands of designers, developers, and decision makers who are desperately looking for inspiration that doesn’t involve another meditation app or food delivery service. Not that there’s anything wrong with those, but sometimes you want to see design that actually helps people stay healthy instead of just helping them avoid cooking dinner.
This collaboration means we’ll be sharing our design process, including all the messy parts. The user research sessions where we discovered that approximately 87 different things were confusing about our initial designs. The prototyping phase where we learned that what works great in our heads doesn’t always work great in real life. The testing sessions that made us question everything we thought we knew about human behavior.
I’m genuinely excited to work with the DesignRush team because they seem to appreciate the kind of design work that makes a real difference. Healthcare UX is not for the faint of heart. You’re dealing with people who are stressed, potentially in pain, and definitely not in the mood for clever design tricks or confusing navigation.
So here we are, little DesignLion, getting ready to collaborate with the big kids at DesignRush. It feels a bit like being invited to sit at the cool table in the cafeteria, except instead of discussing who’s dating whom, we’ll be talking about conversion rates and user journey optimization.
The best part? This collaboration is going to give us a platform to show other designers that good UX isn’t just about making things look sleek and modern. Sometimes the best user experience is the one that gets out of the way completely and just lets people do what they need to do. In healthcare, that often means helping someone take care of themselves or their loved ones without any unnecessary friction.
Who knows, maybe this will inspire more designers to tackle the really challenging projects – the ones that actually matter, the ones that make people’s lives a little bit easier when they’re dealing with important stuff.
Until then, I’ll be over here, refreshing my email to see if they’ve changed their minds about featuring our work. Just kidding. Sort of.
About DesignLion We’re the design agency that believes great design should solve real problems, not just win awards (though we’ll take those too). From logos to web apps, we create digital experiences that actually work for the humans who use them. Find us at our studio, probably arguing about font choices and drinking way too much coffee.
We are listed here.
