Strategic UX for Inclusive Design

Inclusive UX Strategy

Designing for equity across the full spectrum of human experience.

Creating inclusive digital experiences in healthcare means confronting complexity—real-life barriers, unmet needs, and invisible users who are too often excluded from design decisions. I’ve worked across product, research, and strategy teams to ensure that equity isn’t just an afterthought or compliance box, but a driving force behind decisions that affect trust, usability, and engagement.

This work has touched everything from accessibility and life-stage inclusion to gender identity, caregiver needs, and rural infrastructure. It’s not about designing for edge cases. It’s about designing for reality—and in doing so, delivering better outcomes for everyone.

Accessibility as a Foundation

Not an audit step—an embedded mindset.

At Evernorth, I helped shift accessibility from a final QA task to a strategic lens applied across the product lifecycle. I partnered with accessibility specialists and UX researchers to embed inclusive practices early—recruiting people with disabilities, adapting protocols for cognitive and physical accessibility, and integrating insights into content, interaction patterns, and user flows.

We made accessibility a shared responsibility. Teams began to see it not as a barrier to speed but a driver of usability and trust. That mindset change reshaped how products launched, how feedback was interpreted, and how inclusive design became a norm, not a negotiation.

Designing for All Life Stages

Moving beyond digital-native assumptions.

Healthcare tools must serve people in all stages of adulthood—not just early adopters or tech-savvy users. I led a shift in research sampling and persona development to reflect this reality, advocating for the inclusion of middle-aged and older adults in every phase of the design process.

By tying demographic data to usability outcomes, I helped product leaders recognize that their core users were often those left out of testing. This led to re-prioritized roadmaps, refined messaging, and more intuitive designs—particularly on the Express Scripts website, where user complaints dropped and customer sentiment measurably improved.

Rural Access as a Strategic Priority

Designing with geography in mind.

Through research and personal interviews with individuals in rural communities, I uncovered critical barriers that were often overlooked: unreliable or absent broadband, mobile-only access, limited tech literacy, and reliance on shared devices. I shared these insights with product and design teams, helping shift the narrative—rural access wasn’t an edge case, but a common, addressable need.

Rather than just shrinking interfaces or optimizing performance, I advocated for a smarter approach: building lightweight apps that allow users to complete tasks even with intermittent connectivity. These apps would store user actions locally and sync them once a stable signal was detected—an inclusive strategy grounded in real-world constraints.

These weren't just technical workarounds. They were human-centered design solutions that expanded access, respected user context, and redefined what “digital equity” means for rural populations.

Naming, Identity & Digital Dignity

Small language shifts. Big trust gains.

Working alongside a cross-functional team, I led UX research to explore how name, gender, and pronoun fields affected user trust and emotional safety. We heard clearly from transgender, nonbinary, and gender-diverse users that legacy language like "preferred name" caused confusion and alienation. The fix? A small shift—just “name”—but it had outsized impact.

We also tackled backend challenges with legal, design, and engineering partners, ensuring that inclusive defaults weren’t just UI deep but system-wide. This work showed how language, systems, and identity intersect—and how inclusive design builds trust at every level.

Caregivers as Primary Users

Uncovering the invisible persona.

One of the most overlooked healthcare user types is the caregiver: people who manage appointments, prescriptions, and daily health needs for loved ones. Through qualitative research, I helped expose how caregivers were being forced to impersonate others just to navigate digital systems—leading to inaccurate analytics, poor user satisfaction, and significant emotional burden.

I led the creation of caregiver-inclusive personas and experience maps that gave these users a seat at the table in product planning. As a result, caregiver needs were elevated in roadmap conversations, and teams began to explore proxy-access models that reduced operational burden while increasing usability and trust.

Operationalizing Inclusive Research

Embedding equity into research practice.

Inclusion shouldn’t rely on good intentions alone—it should be built into systems. I developed research templates and recruiting frameworks to ensure that studies systematically included people with diverse backgrounds, abilities, geographies, and tech access levels.

From leading AI-assisted pattern analysis to mentoring researchers in equity-centered approaches, I built a scalable foundation for inclusive research that extended beyond individual projects. These operational changes helped normalize inclusive practices across teams—turning them from “nice to have” to baseline expectations.

Trust as a Design Outcome

Not just a legal checkbox—a user experience.

In healthcare, trust directly impacts adoption. I worked with our teams to develop a custom trust scale that measured credibility, clarity, and emotional safety—not by asking users “do you trust us,” but by identifying behavioral signals and stress points across the journey.

We used this insight to improve transparency, adjust consent flows, and implement graduated privacy controls. These decisions didn’t just meet compliance—they built loyalty. Trust became not only measurable, but designable.