Designing Behaviour Change for Long-Term Health and Wellbeing

01 · Challenge

Medication alone wasn't enough.

Managing diabetes requires more than clinical appointments and prescriptions. It requires sustained behaviour change across diet, exercise, routine and mindset — in the context of a person's whole life. The healthcare provider needed a service that could support this kind of long-term, personalised change at scale.

• Care recipients not engaging consistently with care plans between clinical appointments
• The healthcare system designed around medical moments, not the continuous reality of daily life
• Difficulty adjusting care intensity to match how a person's needs changed over time
• No clear mechanism for connecting doctors, care coordinators and coaches around a shared picture of a recipient's goals
• Need to address emotional and motivational barriers to habit change, not just behavioural ones

02 · Approach

Design for the human condition, not just the condition.

I led a design team of five through a three-month workstream focused on the onboarding and coaching experience. The approach was grounded in empathy research and co-design — moving beyond what care recipients said they needed toward understanding how they actually lived.

• 'Day in the life' research to understand the real texture of living with a long-term condition
• Expectation mapping to surface where care recipients felt let down by existing services
• Competitor review of other behaviour change services and digital health platforms
• Service role play to surface breakdowns in the current care experience from multiple perspectives
• Co-design sessions with care recipients to shape onboarding and coaching flows collaboratively
• Service prototypes and storyboards tested with care recipients and clinical staff before soft launch

Methods used

03 · Outcome

A service designed around people, not processes.

Ripple launched as a transformational care offering — embracing the human condition rather than trying to fix it. The experience connected medical care with emotional, behavioural and social support.

• Onboarding experience designed to build trust and motivation from the first interaction
• Coaching model connecting doctors, coordinators and coaches around shared care goals
• Service that adapted its intensity and focus as care recipients' needs and life circumstances changed
• Long-term focus on preventing readmissions and the emergence of related conditions — not just short-term compliance

04 · Impact

Quality care outcomes aligned to the whole person.

The work demonstrated that a healthcare service designed around motivation, emotion and context — not just clinical protocol — could deliver meaningfully better outcomes for care recipients.

Success wasn't a completed care plan. It was a care recipient who felt understood, supported and capable of managing their own health long-term.