Two healthcare MVPs, designed from scratch

Vigorant is a healthcare marketing agency working with dental clinics. In 2025 it set up a small in-house team to build its own SaaS product, Borna Care, as a new revenue stream: software that takes a clinic’s patient admin off the phone and off paper.

I joined to design marketing websites. A month later I moved to the product team full-time, as its only product designer.

Patients book by phone during office hours, fill in the same paper forms at every visit and chase invoices. Clinic staff re-type all of it.

What we had to achieve: two connected products, one for patients and one for clinic staff, designed from zero, ready for real clinics within months, and built as the foundation for a five-product platform.

• Learned the dental and healthcare domain from scratch, including what HIPAA means for UI.
• Reviewed more than 10 patient-portal and practice-management products: what patients expect, and where clinic workflows break.
• Mapped the recurring pains: repetitive paperwork, scheduling by phone, confusing billing and managing family members’ care.

I mapped the full product for patients, clinic admins and providers: every action, decision and edge case, with open questions pinned next to the step they affected.

The flows described the whole product. The MVP kept what a clinic needs on day one: appointments, forms, payments, family members and notifications. It deferred messaging and telehealth, treatment history and educational content.

I rebuilt the information architecture and flows around that smaller scope, so the MVP felt complete rather than unfinished, with room for the deferred features to slot back in without a redesign.

On paper, exploration was cheap. I sketched several models for the patient home, from a “puzzle” dashboard and a bookshelf metaphor to an assistant asking “what do you need to do today?”, and six ways to show treatment history.

My early concepts used a soft, neumorphic style: a home for the future five-product platform, Dash redrawn in the new language, and the first patient form.

I built the system in Figma (colour, type, spacing, components and interaction patterns) and owned it as the product scaled to multi-clinic setups.

The product grew fast: Forms, then the patient portal, then the admin portal, then multi-clinic support. My first super profile nested clinics inside the owner’s account. As clinics were added, admins needed to work inside a clinic rather than hunt for it. I redesigned the IA, menus and profiles so that entering a clinic became the first step.

Role and permission requirements were ambiguous. Rather than design screens on assumptions, I made a comparison matrix of roles and permissions and resolved every open question with the founder and developers. Then I revisited every flow and annotated the handoff.

Engineers implemented it without rework, which saved the team a couple of days.

The patient and admin portal MVPs were ready in February, four months after I started on the product. Then we kept shipping features on top.

Intake forms became a standalone product, Borna Forms. It was the first part of Borna to be sold, and it won the product’s first paying client.

• Annotated handoffs and component consistency reviews, working directly with both developers on feasibility.
• Fixed a few UI bugs in code myself.
• Tested the built product before launch and logged 60+ bugs in Azure Boards.

My role grew with the product. I was given lead product designer responsibilities because the team saw high potential. My work spread beyond design, into product decisions and a few front-end fixes in code. The founder started asking me product questions, like whether to sell features separately or as one package, which is how I started learning product management.

• Test with real clinic staff earlier. I proposed and planned user testing before launch. Ideally it goes into the plan from week one, not at the end.
• Define success metrics up front. We shipped fast but didn’t instrument the launch. At Deaku I now set activation criteria before designing.
• Next on the roadmap was bringing Dash Vigorant into the new system and designing two more products on the same foundation.

Mentored and onboarded a supporting designer · designed three marketing landing pages and an email template · contributed to the logo and brand book · designed the Borna AI website · completed HIPAA compliance training · introduced AI design tools to the team.