CatSalut is the public health service of Catalonia, responsible for healthcare coverage for over 7.5 million people. The organization needed to modernize how citizens interact with the health system (from finding the right care to booking appointments and understanding their symptoms) without losing the trust and accessibility that public services depend on. The project demanded both strategic rigor and deep human sensitivity. Designing for a population that includes vulnerable, elderly, and digitally excluded users, while simultaneously meeting institutional ambitions around automation, AI, and self-service.

01. Challenge

How might we redesign the citizen-facing health experience so that people can navigate, self-assess, and access care efficiently without increasing the burden on an already saturated primary care system?

The goal was to translate institutional intent into a human-centered digital ecosystem that worked across diverse user profiles, literacy levels, and access contexts.

02. Core Problem

CatSalut operated with significant structural tension. The system's demand far exceeded its capacity, yet the digital tools available to citizens were either underused or poorly understood. Symptom triage happened by phone, appointments were booked through fragmented channels, and the digital layer was largely invisible to the users who needed it most. At the same time, the organization had ambitions to introduce AI-powered self-assessment tools and conversational interfaces without a clear picture of what citizens actually needed, or what comparable systems around the world were already doing well. The risk was investing in sophisticated solutions that solved institutional problems rather than human ones.

03. My Role

Research Lead & Service Designer

I led the benchmarking and competitive analysis phase of the project, researching the global landscape of digital health tools across symptom evaluators, appointment scheduling systems, chatbots, triage platforms, and accessibility solutions. I structured the Inspiration Wall, a comparative intelligence exercise covering twelve reference products across health and adjacent sectors, and synthesized findings into actionable design principles for the CatSalut product team. I also facilitated co-design sessions with stakeholders to translate research insights into service design decisions, and contributed to defining the interaction logic for the symptom-checking and appointment-booking flows.

04. Impact

Benchmarking clarity Mapped twelve reference products across symptom evaluators (Symptomate, WebMD, FirstDerm), appointment systems (Mayo Clinic, Dr. on Demand, Healthdirect), chatbots (Mediktor, Healthily, Albert), and accessibility tools (NHS Inform, Porto), giving the team a shared reference framework to evaluate design decisions against real-world precedent.

Design principles Distilled recurring patterns like predictive search, conditional logic, visual body-map navigation, conversational design, into a set of evidence-based principles that guided the interaction design of the platform.

Accessibility lens Surfaced accessibility as a first-class design requirement, not a compliance afterthought, drawing on solutions like ReachDeck (audio reading, visual dictionary, 100+ language translation) and Hand Talk (sign-language plugin integration).

Strategic framing Reframed the project from a feature-delivery exercise into a patient empowerment challenge, shifting the question from "what can the system do?" to "what do citizens need to feel capable and informed?"

05. Takeaways

Trust is the interface In public health, the experience is only as good as the citizen's confidence in it. Clarity, transparency, and plain language are not nice-to-haves, they are the product.

The body is a universal search bar Across every leading reference, visual body-map navigation consistently outperformed text-only search for symptom entry. Spatial, intuitive interaction lowers the cognitive load at the moment users need it most.

Conversational design as care The best health chatbots made people feel heard. Conditional logic and empathetic language design reduced abandonment and increased the quality of information shared.

Accessibility is structural Designing for excluded users (low digital literacy, visual or hearing impairment, non-Catalan speakers) is not a separate workstream; it reveals the quality of the core design. If it works for them, it works for everyone.

06. Research & Framing

We structured the research around:

Sector benchmarking Examined how leading health platforms worldwide handle symptom evaluation, appointment scheduling, chatbot interaction, and accessibility, mapping twelve reference products across tools like Symptomate, WebMD, Mayo Clinic, Mediktor, and NHS Inform.

Cross-sector analogues Drew lessons from adjacent industries: Spotify's personalization logic, Typeform's conditional survey design, Calendly's scheduling intelligence, and Duolingo's onboarding and progressive engagement model.

Trend mapping Investigated four macro-trends shaping the future of digital health: the e-patient movement, quantified self technologies and wearable integration, decentralized and remote medicine, and AI-powered diagnostics.

Comparative synthesis Translated findings into a structured matrix mapping value propositions, information collection strategies, search mechanics, and classification logic across all reference products, creating a shared decision-making framework for the product team.

07. Key Insights

Self-assessment requires earned trust Symptom evaluators only work when users believe in them. Every reference product invested heavily in onboarding explaining what the tool does, what it doesn't do, and what will happen next. CatSalut's credibility as a public institution was an asset that needed to be made visible in the interface, not assumed.

Conditional logic is the interaction architecture Across all categories reviewed, the most effective tools used logic that adapted to the user's inputs in real time. Showing only relevant follow-up questions reduced friction and increased the accuracy of the information captured. This was the single most consistent pattern across the entire competitive landscape.

From portal to ecosystem The benchmark revealed that leading health platforms had moved beyond transactional interactions toward ongoing relationships tracking chronic conditions, integrating wearable data, following up after appointments. CatSalut's digital strategy needed to think beyond the single visit and toward a longitudinal health management model.