Designing a personalized health content experience

Mayo Clinic Press publishes expert-backed health and wellness content across articles, books, podcasts, and video. I helped translate that growing content ecosystem into a mobile product designed around discovery, consumption, and ongoing engagement.

The experience brought multiple content formats into one app while giving users more control over what they see, save, and return to.

Project Details


Lead Product Designer

Led end-to-end product design for the iOS app, from early concepts and user flows through interaction design, high-fidelity UI, prototyping, and launch. Built and systematized the component library and patterns used across the product.

Cross-functional Team

Partnered directly with a Product Manager and a small engineering team, working closely through design decisions, technical feasibility, implementation, and QA.

6 months

Designed the full app experience across onboarding, content discovery, articles, podcasts, video, personalization, saved content, premium experiences, and account flows.

The Challenge

Turn a broad publishing ecosystem into a mobile experience that feels useful, personal, and easy to navigate.

The product needed to support very different ways of consuming health content without creating a fragmented experience. Users needed to move easily between quick reads, long-form articles, podcasts, videos, books, and personalized recommendations while still understanding where they were and what was available to them.

The experience also needed to support free and premium content, account creation, saved content, topic preferences, and repeat engagement.

Creating a content model that could scale

One experience, multiple ways to consume content

Mayo Clinic Press content spans traditional articles, books, podcasts, video, recipes, expert perspectives, and other health resources. Rather than treating each format as a separate destination, I designed a shared discovery model that could accommodate different content types while maintaining consistent hierarchy and interaction patterns.

Reusable cards and metadata helped users quickly understand what something was, how long it would take to consume, and what actions were available before opening it.

Designing for deeper content consumption

The Media experience brought podcasts and video into the same product while respecting the behaviors each format required.

For podcasts, I designed browsing, episode actions, queue management, and a dedicated audio player so users could continue listening while navigating elsewhere in the app. Video used the same broader content system while supporting inline playback and discovery.

Making the experience personal

Giving users control over what comes next

Health interests are highly individual, so personalization became part of the product structure rather than simply a recommendation module.

Users could select topics they cared about, save individual stories, and return to a personalized content collection through My News. Topic controls were designed to remain editable so the experience could evolve as users' interests changed.

Building onboarding around product value

Introducing value before asking for commitment

Rather than leading immediately with account creation, onboarding introduced the breadth of the product first: podcasts, books, saved content, premium access, personalized health insights, and the larger Mayo Clinic Press ecosystem.

Account creation was positioned after users understood what the product offered, while allowing them to skip and begin exploring sooner.

Building onboarding around product value

Creating a clear path from content discovery to subscription

Mayo Clinic Press needed to balance access to trusted health content with a paid premium offering. I designed the subscription and paywall experience to clearly communicate what users could access, what required a subscription, and the value of upgrading without disrupting content discovery.

  • Defined entry points into premium content across the app

  • Designed locked, preview, paywall, and subscribed states

  • Created monthly and annual subscription paths

  • Connected account and subscription states across the experience

  • Systematized premium patterns so they could be reused as the product expanded

Reflection

Launched a new consumer product for Mayo Clinic Press

The app launched on the App Store in March 2026, creating a new mobile channel for Mayo Clinic Press and bringing its health content, media, personalization, saved content, and premium subscription experiences into a dedicated product.

That is considerably better than trying to manufacture a metric. “Launched a new consumer product for Mayo Clinic Press” is a legitimate business outcome.

1.0 launch

March 24, 2026.

3,700+

Mayo Clinic experts powering the content ecosystem

2

Subscription tiers

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