Designing for someone who is already exhausted
What I learned from building medimatefoundation.org: when your user is a caregiver searching at midnight, every design decision is a small act of care.
My grandmother was diagnosed with Glioblastoma two years ago. Glioblastoma is a brain cancer with a median survival time measured in months. It is the kind of diagnosis that reorganizes everything: what you talk about, what you plan for, how you spend Sundays.
I watched my family navigate it from a distance — the appointments, the specialists, the paperwork, the medications, the side effects of the medications, the management of the side effects. And I watched the caregivers who were present for all of it, day after day, carry that load with a steadiness I found impossible to understand.
This is why I joined MediMate Foundation. And why building medimatefoundation.org felt like the most design-critical thing I'd worked on.
Here's the thing about designing for healthcare audiences: they're not browsing casually. A person who lands on a patient support nonprofit's website is usually at an inflection point — just received a diagnosis, just became a caregiver, searching for something that might help at a moment when they feel like nothing can. The stakes of that landing experience are real in a way that most design work's stakes are not.
The first thing this means is: cognitive load matters enormously. Cognitive load is the amount of mental effort required to process and navigate an interface. For someone who has been at a hospital since 7am and is searching on their phone at 11pm, a confusing nav or an overwhelming homepage isn't just bad design — it's a barrier to care. Clarity is kindness in a way that feels unusually literal in this context.
The second thing: trust must be established within seconds. Not earned — established. The difference matters. You can't ask someone in crisis to read six paragraphs before they decide whether to trust you. The design has to signal credibility, warmth, and relevance immediately. Real faces, human language, a clear statement of who this is for and what it does.
The third thing, and the one that most surprised me: what gets designed out is as important as what gets designed in. Every element we considered and removed was a choice to give the visitor more breathing room. A cluttered page says: we have a lot to tell you. A spare page says: we respect your attention.
I think about my grandmother's caregivers when I make design decisions on this project. Not as an abstraction — as a specific image. Someone who has been caring all day and comes home and searches for something, anything, that might help them care a little more sustainably tomorrow.
That's who the site is for. Every button label, every image choice, every second it takes to load is a design decision in their direction — or against them.
That constraint has made me a better designer. I hope it continues to.