How can healthcare UX and digital patient experiences impact patient outcomes? well, imagine: You have a minor health concern you keep meaning to check. It’s not urgent, but you want reassurance that it’s nothing serious. You start online. Search results give possibilities, but not certainty. One clinic looks promising, but its site does not clearly explain the service, cost, or insurance coverage. Rather than booking with unanswered questions, you move on. The next clinic clearly lists costs, but booking requires a phone call. That extra step is enough to push the task to later, especially when the issue feels minor. You wanted to see a doctor, but missing information, effortful scheduling, and low urgency made it easier to postpone. None of these barriers prevented you from booking on their own; together, they were enough to delay care. Unfortunately, this is a common experience, and one that highlights how inconveniences with navigating online tools and resources can interfere with someone’s healthcare intentions by shaping their engagement. While these tasks should be straightforward, they often require more work than expected. Healthcare is, by nature, complex. When people are already busy, stressed, or trying to fit healthcare around the demands of everyday life, these relatively small tasks can start to feel burdensome. Cognitive Load Theory In behavioural science, cognitive load theory helps explain how people make decisions when mental effort is limited. In simple terms, our mental energy is finite, so we often prefer easier decisions over harder ones. When that mental effort becomes too high, people may rely on emotion, guesswork, or avoid making a decision altogether.1 Yet healthcare companies often underestimate the role cognitive load plays in helping patients make healthy decisions. There is a common assumption that simply making information available will enable patients to find it and make informed choices. In reality, when people are required to sift through and interpret large amounts of information on their own, the added mental effort can lead to suboptimal decisions or no action at all. For pharmaceutical companies, a well-designed healthcare UX experience is not just a usability improvement; it can influence whether patients enrol in support programs, understand therapy expectations, start treatment confidently, and stay engaged over time. By reducing unnecessary effort, companies can help patients and HCPs move from information to action with fewer missed steps. The challenge is that cognitive loads are rarely obvious. Patients don’t typically tell you they’re experiencing it. Instead, they abandon the process, postpone decisions, or look elsewhere. How Do We Discover Where Friction Exists? A difficulty, of course, is that friction is often hard to spot from the inside. Teams understand their products, services, and processes extremely well. As a result, journeys that seem straightforward internally can feel much more complex from the outside. This is where healthcare UX research becomes valuable. Observing how users actually navigate digital experiences often reveals moments of hesitation, frustration, or uncertainty that would otherwise go unnoticed. These issues are not always major; sometimes there are small gaps between what users expect and what an experience provides, but those gaps can still shape outcomes. Ultimately, the organisations that succeed will not necessarily be those that provide the most information, but those that make it easiest for patients to act on the information they need. Where it Goes Right: Some healthcare companies have grown by designing for cognitive ease. By enhancing the healthcare UX experience around accessing information, scheduling, and, in some cases, accessing medications, they reduce effort at key decision points and make each step feel easier to complete. Take Zocdoc. Instead of requiring patients to search for multiple clinic websites, compare providers manually, or call individual practices, Zocdoc brings much of that information into one place. Patients can search by specialty, location, insurance provider, appointment availability, and verified reviews, helping them answer key questions before booking. Most importantly, appointments can often be scheduled online in just a few clicks. Centralizing the search-to-schedule process helps remove additional steps that would otherwise require additional effort. Another example is Hims & Hers, a direct-to-consumer platform that offers treatment for common conditions such as erectile dysfunction, hair loss, menopause, and weight management. Rather than presenting complex clinical information upfront, they guide patients through a structured questionnaire and provide treatment recommendations based on their responses. Pricing, treatment options, and next steps are clearly communicated throughout the process, helping patients move forward one decision at a time instead of navigating a complex healthcare system on their own. While healthcare decisions remain complex, these platforms simplify the decision-making process to support better patient access to care. By reducing unnecessary cognitive effort, making information easier to find, and removing avoidable barriers, they make it more likely that patients will follow through on the healthcare actions they already intended to take. Final Thoughts Healthcare will always involve a degree of complexity, and not every challenge can or should be designed away. At the same time, the journey to care begins long before treatment starts. Patients need to find information, evaluate options, book appointments, and navigate systems that can already feel overwhelming, particularly when they’re dealing with a health concern. Making those journeys easier won’t solve every access challenge in healthcare, but it may remove barriers that are often overlooked because they seem too small to matter despite quietly shaping how people interact with care. At HRW, we’re able to uncover these moments of friction. By combining healthcare expertise with behavioural science and digital health knowledge, we help clients understand how patients and healthcare professionals actually navigate healthcare UX experiences and uncover how those experiences can be improved to better support the people they’re designed for. Sometimes the biggest opportunities aren’t found in adding new features or functionality, but in identifying the points of effort that make accessing care harder than it needs to be. Please feel free to get in touch to learn more: HRWDigital@hrwhealthcare.com By Doran Campbell and Tony Jiang References: Sweller, J. (2010). Cognitive load theory: Recent theoretical advances. In J. L. Plass, R. Moreno, & R. Brünken (Eds.), Cognitive load theory (pp. 29-47). New York, NY, US: Cambridge University Press. Apply Now!