I spent a few hundred kilometres riding a scooter around Paris to interview people with Type 2 diabetes and their doctors. We had one month to understand why patients were not following their treatment plans, France as the test market, and a senior-management presentation waiting at the end.

Before the first client meeting, I spent a weekend learning the basics: how diabetes affects the body, the available drugs, blood-sugar measures, and the French treatment protocols. I watched videos, read what I could, and spoke with a medical-student friend. It was enough to participate without saying anything foolish, although I still felt like the least informed person in the room. That is often a useful place for a UX designer to begin: curious and prepared, but not yet attached to the obvious framing of the problem.

The Brief Was the Appointment

The initial hypothesis was straightforward. Doctors did not have enough time to explain a treatment plan during the short GP appointment reimbursed by state insurance, so our design question became: how might we make that consultation more efficient?

It was a plausible place to start, and one month made a narrow problem attractive. We did the desk research, looked at comparable conditions, and recruited patients and GPs for in-depth interviews across Paris. The interviews quickly changed the centre of gravity of the project.

Patients were often eager to speak. Many described a condition that had become isolating: the fear of the diagnosis, the awkwardness of explaining it to family, and the difficult work of reorganising ordinary life around it.

One woman told us that her husband objected when she began making salads instead of the richer dinners he expected. That detail stayed with me because it made the problem much larger than a lack of information. When a lifestyle change has to be negotiated at home as well as understood in a clinic, a prescription alone is not much of a support system.

We also met patients who described their doctors as coaches. Those doctors made time to explain the condition clearly, involved family members, encouraged people when their results were poor, and found ways to make the work feel possible. The contrast suggested that the quality of a consultation was not only about its duration. It was about whether the patient left with understanding, confidence, and people around them who could help.

The differences between doctors were just as striking. They appeared before any clinical question was asked: in waiting rooms, in how carefully someone listened, in the tools they used, and in whether patients could contact them between appointments. Some doctors described a quick instruction-and-prescription routine. Others showed us videos they watched with patients, explained how they brought spouses into the conversation, or shared small practical devices they had invented to help people change their habits.

The System Became the Product

By then, our first hypothesis no longer held up on its own. The research suggested a relationship between consultation time and a doctorā€™s motivation, but it also revealed a broader set of moments where a person could fall away from care. Patients needed a clinician who could explain the condition without overwhelming them. They also needed family and friends who could make difficult changes workable at home. Other branches of the model remain confidential, but the direction was clear: the appointment was only one part of the system.

We cross-referenced the patient and GP personas with our survey and wider research, then estimated where people were likely to drop off at each stage. That changed the shape of the output. We were no longer designing a better 15-minute conversation; we were designing support across the patientā€™s journey.

The follow-on ideas ranged from GP support groups and family-focused instructional videos to progress-tracking mobile apps. The point was not that one of these concepts would solve Type 2 diabetes. It was that each concept responded to a different relationship or moment in the system, instead of forcing the entire problem back into the consultation room.

The senior-management presentation received an unusually warm response. The work went on to inform the companyā€™s approach to diabetes, its digital strategy, and its research methods. What stayed with me was less the response than the distance we had travelled from the original brief.

I began the project riding between appointments across Paris, focused on a single meeting between a doctor and a patient. I came away thinking that the most useful design move was noticing everything outside that meeting: the family dinner, the doctorā€™s motivation, the follow-up, and the small sources of confidence that make a treatment plan possible to live with.

Original portfolio case study: Developing a New Holistic Approach to Managing Diabetes Type II