Benenden
Defining a vision for a digital healthcare service that members would actually use
A 2-month strategy engagement to reimagine the Benenden member experience, from research to a future experience blueprint that secured board-level investment.
TIMELINE
Aug - Oct 2024
TYPE
Client Project
PLATFORM
iOS & Web
MY ROLE
Research, UX audit, service blueprint, product strategy
THE PROBLEM
The digital healthcare market is crowded and largely failing its users. By late 2022 there were 227,500 healthcare apps available, and 85% of them had fewer than 5,000 downloads in total. The pattern is consistent across the category: apps that feel disconnected from real healthcare moments, cold in tone, and quickly abandoned.
227,500
Healthcare apps in the market by late 2022
85%
With fewer than 5,000 total downloads
84
Apps downloaded more than 10m times
THE TASK
Benenden Health, a UK mutual healthcare society serving a large membership on a not-for-profit basis, had an opportunity to stand apart. They tasked us with redefining their digital member experience to drive long-term engagement and member retention. Our job was to define what that could look like, grounded in what members actually needed from a healthcare service.
DISCOVERY: UNDERSTANDING THE HEALTH & WELLNESS SPACE
We ran 12 ethnographic interviews with a mix of Benenden and non-Benenden members, covering a range of ages, claim histories, and healthcare providers to understand how people actually think about their health, what they want from a healthcare service, and where every existing app was falling short.
Two insights had the most direct influence on the strategic direction:
INSIGHT
Health should feel integrated, not obsessive
Health, for most of the people we spoke to, was about moderation as opposed to obsession. That applied to everything; exercise, diet, and how much they wanted a health app involved in their daily life. Nobody wanted to be pestered. The feeling that came through consistently was that a good health service should be available when you need it and stay out of the way when you don't.
This became the foundational design principle for the whole service: digital balance. Every feature, nudge, and piece of content was evaluated against whether it was earning its place in someone's life or extracting attention they hadn't offered.
INSIGHT
Claims are the make-or-break moment
Every competitor was falling short on claims. Cold, process-driven claims experiences were the norm across the category.
For Benenden, getting empathy right was a genuine point of difference and research had handed us the evidence to make that case to the client.
UX AUDIT
A UX audit of the existing Benenden experience ran alongside research, mapping every screen across the app and web portal. Five themes came out of it: no meaningful onboarding, impersonal and irrelevant content, inconsistent IA across platforms, low emotional engagement in sensitive flows, and too much manual input required throughout. Together these painted a picture of a service that was functional but felt cold, and that had no strategic logic connecting any of its parts.
OBJECT-ORIENTED UX (OOUX)
Alongside the UX audit, I ran an OOUX analysis on the existing Benenden experience to map the relationships between the objects that made up the service; member, claim, appointment, content, notification, and so on. The audit told us what existed. The OOUX told us how it all connected, and where the gaps and dependencies were. It was particularly useful for identifying where the app was treating related things as separate, which explained a lot of the disconnected, cold feeling members described in research.
THE STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK: FOUR MOVES
With research and audit complete, we synthesised the findings into a clear from → to: mapping where Benenden's digital experience currently sat against where it needed to get to. From that, we defined four strategic moves; the shifts that would need to happen to transform the service from a functional utility into something members genuinely valued.
MOVE 1
A seamless, end-to-end claims experience
From a functional hand-off to a supported, empathetic journey through the most emotionally significant moments in a member's healthcare life.
MOVE 2
Meaningful personalisation
From generic content shown to everyone to a service that adapts to who the member is, what they've accessed, and where they are in their health journey.
MOVE 3
Preventative and self-care content
From a reactive claims service to one that also shows up during good health, giving members a reason to engage when they don't need to make a claim.
MOVE 4
Inspiring nudges that build momentum
From no explicit guidance across the journey to contextual prompts that feel relevant, timely, and worth acting on, nudges that inspire rather than interrupt.
MOMENT DESIGN: TRANSLATING STRATEGY INTO EXPERIENCE PRINCIPLES
The four moves gave us the strategic direction we needed. What we didn’t have was an experience strategy that would help deliver it, Moment Design gave us the method to translate it into a concrete service vision.
Most healthcare apps sit dormant for weeks or months at a time. People open them when something's wrong, when they need to book something, or when they're trying to stay on top of their health.
Moment Design gave us a framework that matched that reality; shifting focus from features to the specific moments where the service and the member actually meet. The Peak-End Rule gave us a prioritisation principle: people remember the emotional high point and the ending, not the average. In a low-frequency app, that meant the highest-stakes moments deserved the most considered design treatment.
Empathy moments
The bad times. Being unwell, making a claim, receiving a diagnosis. These needed warmth, clarity, and reassurance above everything else.
Momentum moments
The good times. Feeling healthy, setting goals, engaging with preventative content. These needed motivation, celebration, and a sense of progress.
Unmemorable moments
The admin. Logging in, updating details, managing an account. These should be fast and frictionless — done and out of the way.
Why this mattered for the blueprint: Categorising every moment by type meant we could deliberately calibrate the design investment at each stage. Signature empathy moments, like receiving a GP consultation result, got the most considered, emotionally led design treatment. Unmemorable moments got out of the user's way. The blueprint made those priorities explicit and defensible.
THE SERVICE BLUEPRINT
The primary deliverable was a service blueprint that structured the entire member experience around four lifestages, reflecting how Benenden's healthcare offering actually unlocks over time, based on member tenure.
First experience
Download & discover
App download, profile setup, service orientation, and first health check.
0–6 months
Foundation
GP services and foundational wellbeing content. Building the habit of engagement.
6–24 months
Expansion
Eligibility expands to physiotherapy, mental health support, and self-care tools.
24+ months
Full access
Diagnostics, treatment and surgery requests. The highest-stakes moments in the member journey.
For each lifestage, the blueprint mapped the specific moments a member would experience, the emotional goal of each interaction, the features that would make it up, upsell and reward opportunities at relevant milestones, third-party dependencies, and the expected outcomes. It gave the Benenden team a single, end-to-end view of what the service needed to become, and in what order to build it.
I led the design and construction of the blueprint in Figma, working closely with the lead strategist to ensure the structure reflected both the research outputs and the operational realities of what Benenden could actually deliver.
CONFIDENTIALITY NOTE