Skip to content
Fernwick

Case study — Health

Designing a scalable care-platform design system

UX DesignUI Design
Dual monitors showing interface design work for the care platform design system

Overview

Client
Northwind Health
Year
2023 — 2024
Role
Design Lead
Scope
Tokens, components, docs

Northwind Health runs appointment booking, care plans and messaging for dozens of clinics — but every team was designing from scratch. Buttons differed ward to ward, accessibility fixes never stuck, and engineers rebuilt the same patterns every sprint.

I led the design of Fernwick’s answer: a shared system of tokens, components and guidance robust enough for clinical workflows, yet flexible enough for each clinic’s identity. The work began with an audit of more than three hundred screens and ended with a documented library the whole organisation could build on.

The challenge

One product, fourteen visual dialects

Each clinic team had forked the interface to meet local needs, so patients moving between services met a different product every time. Worse, critical states — dosage confirmations, consent screens, alert banners — behaved inconsistently, which in healthcare is a safety issue, not a style issue.

The system had to unify without flattening: clinics needed room for their own content while patients got one coherent, trustworthy experience.

Designers reviewing interface components together during the system audit

The approach

Tokens first, then components, then habits

Phase 01

Audit & principles

Mapped every pattern in production, then agreed five guiding principles with clinical, product and engineering leads.

Phase 02

Tokens & core components

Built colour, type and spacing tokens first, then the thirty components that covered the vast majority of screens.

Phase 03

Docs & adoption

Wrote usage guidance with live examples and ran office hours until every team had migrated their first flow.

Two designers pairing on component specifications in the studio Hands documenting component usage guidelines on a keyboard

Outcome

  • One shared language

    Designers and engineers now name the same things the same way, and design reviews focus on flows instead of button radii.

  • Accessibility by default

    Contrast, focus and touch-target rules are baked into the tokens, so every new screen inherits them automatically.

  • Faster clinic onboarding

    New clinics assemble their patient experience from proven patterns instead of commissioning bespoke screens.

Keep exploring

Need a system your teams will actually use?

Contact me