Designing for the Most Anxious Moment

As part of the 10k Designers program, I worked on four major user flows for Mito Health, a US-based, YC-backed startup that takes lab test results and helps people understand what they mean at a deeper level. It's built for busy, health-conscious people with demanding jobs who don't have the time to truly understand what's going on inside their bodies.

I didn't pick this as a convenient portfolio project. My great-grandparents were Ayurvedic doctors, my grandparents too. Growing up, we didn't wait to get sick, we prevented it, treating the body as a system to maintain, not a problem to fix once it broke. I spent five years designing for Farmley and leading the Indian Healthy Snacking Summit, a government-recognised initiative reaching 13,000+ respondents. One belief kept surfacing: modern healthcare is built for sickness, not for health. Mito Health felt like the same problem, approached from a different direction. Biomarkers instead of food, but the same instinct: know the body before something goes wrong.

This project moved through four phases: UX research and analysis, visual design, wireframing, and prototyping.

Healthcare, as it exists today, is a misnomer. It's sick-care. The US spends $18 of every $100 on healthcare, more than housing, more than groceries, yet 95% of that spending goes to treatment, not prevention. The system is built to respond once something is wrong, not to help people stay well in the first place.

Into that gap has rushed a $6.3 trillion global wellness industry: Pilates, cold plunge, matcha, moringa, ashwagandha, all trending, most of it generic. Without knowing your own biomarkers, this advice is a guess. The data-driven alternative already exists at the top of the market. Bryan Johnson spends $2M a year tracking his aging. Peter Attia runs a concierge longevity clinic. But this level of personalised, evidence-based health data is locked to the 1%. Mito Health's bet: most of the value in that $2M protocol comes down to regular biomarker testing paired with evidence-based habits, made available for $349 a year.

A product that closes the gap between 'I did a blood test' and 'I know what to do about it' needs to do three things a static lab report cannot.

Who this is for: busy, health-conscious professionals with demanding jobs, the kind of person who wants to take care of their body but doesn't have the bandwidth to become their own biomarker expert.

Persona: Priya, 32. Works a 9-to-5+ job in a high-growth company. Does yoga twice a week, tries to eat well, follows health trends on Instagram but is quietly overwhelmed by how much conflicting advice exists. Has never had a full blood panel done before. Booked a Mito test out of curiosity and a growing sense that 'just trying to be healthy' isn't the same as actually knowing what her body needs.

I organised every design decision into three layers to stay disciplined about what the core experience actually needed versus what could wait.

The mobile experience is structured around four connected flows, sequenced to match the real order a user moves through them.

Splash screens carry full-bleed micro-organism photography over a dark background before a single number appears. Sign-up sits in a bottom sheet so the biological world stays visible behind the form.

The post-test home leads with biological age framed as an upward arc, then 88 markers in a healthy range before the 12 focus areas. Health Insights, including Dr. Ryan Ware's clinician card, moved out of a hidden carousel into full-width stacked cards.

The questionnaire builds the health plan across goals, diet preference, dietary restrictions, and lifestyle, with a stepped progress bar across every screen. The loading state rotates through reassuring copy: 'Reviewing your 100 biomarkers... Cross-referencing with longevity research... Your Mito MD is personalising your plan.'

The outcome is a mobile experience built around one governing idea: every screen should reduce anxiety before it introduces information. From the onboarding photography to the loading state copy, each decision was tested against that standard, including several that only became visible through mentor critique, not my own first pass.

My grandparents practiced medicine with a philosophy modern healthcare has mostly forgotten: know the person first, the symptom second. Mito is trying to do the same thing. The biomarkers are the Ayurvedic examination, the AI is the vaidya's accumulated knowledge, the health plan is the Rasayana. The difference is it's now available to anyone with $349 and a blood draw, not only those born into families who kept the knowledge alive.

The hardest problem in health UX isn't information architecture or visual hierarchy. It's trust. Every decision either builds it or erodes it, often in ways the user never consciously notices. That's the work I want to keep doing.