Channels 📱: App + web
Markets 🇺🇸: US
My role 🙍🏻♀️: Senior Product Designer
Team 👥: PM, Product, Design
When 📅: Q1–Q2 2023
Status 🚦: Shipped
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✨ My Learnings ✨: Prevention is not simply an information or motivation problem. Even among people at elevated risk, many did not recognize their personal vulnerability or feel ready to act immediately after receiving their results. Especially in the US healthcare context, users consistently needed clear education first, as financial constraints and limited access to care often forced them to prioritize urgent needs over preventive steps.
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Leadership identified metabolic health — specifically Type 2 diabetes prevention — as the next journey to expand into beyond Ada's core symptom assessment. It was structured as a US-based initiative run in 4-week sprints so we could move and learn fast. The plan was to build a Minimum Sellable Product (something we could actually charge for) around diabetes risk: help people understand their risk early and nudge them towards healthier choices before they tipped into a diagnosis. The MSP target was 100+ paying users.
The final flow that was shipped on the Ada app (shortened for your convenience).
The final flow that was shipped on the Ada app (shortened for your convenience).
US-based users, recruited remotely, split into two cohorts on purpose: people already identified as at risk of diabetes, and people not likely at risk. The interesting aspect here is that the people who most need diabetes prevention are often the least likely to be looking for it — they don't feel sick, so there's no obvious moment that makes them act. So the audience question was less "who are they" and more "what would make someone who feels completely fine do something about a risk they can't see yet".
The business problem was straightforward: Ada’s core product ended at symptom assessment. Users got their results and left. To own more of the patient journey and build a monetizable Minimum Sellable Product, leadership wanted to expand into preventative metabolic health.
However, the user tension was much more complex. Selling "prevention" is notoriously difficult because you are asking symptom-free users to care about an invisible future risk. Before designing any interfaces, we had to figure out if people even wanted to know their diabetes risk in the first place.
I led the design and helped research end to end — writing the protocols, running the interviews, synthesising everything, and turning it into recommendations the product and design teams could build from, alongside ideation sessions with the PM to shape direction. My contributions spanned: