Digital Health · UX Research · Strategy
Provider-Centered Research
Getting close enough to a remote wellness platform's practitioners to help shape how the offering was positioned, built, and delivered.
The Context
A founder building a practitioner-facing wellness platform came to me with a problem I hear often: nobody had actually sat down with the practitioners the product was meant to serve. Independent wellness practitioners were juggling fragmented tools and unclear positioning, and the team needed real insight into how they moved through their work, not more assumptions.
The Ask
I came in as an embedded research partner, which meant getting close enough to the work to speak to it from the inside. My job was to surface how practitioners actually experienced their care journeys, where trust broke down, and what they needed but weren't getting, then turn all of that into something the team could act on.
That research ended up shaping how the offering was framed, delivered, and rebuilt, grounded in the real workflows and friction points practitioners lived with every day, not in guesses about them.
The Work
I started by mapping the terrain.
Before I talked to a single provider, I worked to understand the different care models and digital touchpoints they moved through, so I'd know where trust and adoption were actually breaking down instead of guessing.
Then I did a lot of listening.
I led 10 to 20 in-depth interviews a week with practitioners across a wide range of care types, letting their care journeys, unmet needs, and decision points surface in their own words.
The patterns started repeating.
As the interviews added up, I pulled the recurring threads together: the pain points, the adoption barriers, the pricing tensions that kept showing up across very different kinds of practices.
I turned what I'd heard into a point of view.
That synthesis became clear positioning, service design direction, and an engagement strategy the founder could actually use to make decisions.
And I left them with a way to keep going.
The last piece was a practitioner-informed roadmap: not just my findings, but a way of thinking about the offering's evolution the team could carry forward on their own.
The Outcome
Here's what came out of it:
Core Offering Changes
We refined the service's positioning, pricing logic, and engagement model based on what practitioners actually validated as needs and barriers.
Practitioner Interviews
I heard directly from a wide range of self-care and body-based health providers about their lived experience, trust dynamics, and care constraints.
Repeatable Research Framework
I left the founder with a scalable, mixed-methods process they could reuse for their next product or market decision.