da.care / Dashboard
The dashboard
that feels like
a thoughtful friend.
Designing a health companion that earns trust slowly, the way humans actually give it.
ROLE
Lead Designer
TIMELINE
12 weeks · Jan – Apr 2025
TEAM
Mira Dobcheva + 2 engineers
SKILLS
UX/UI · Strategy · Research · Systems
OVERVIEW
A health companion, not a control panel.
What if a health dashboard
could feel like a friend?
For 12 weeks, I led product design on da.care — a holistic health platform serving both clinicians and patients. As lead designer, I shaped the product concept, interaction design, and visual direction across the dashboard ecosystem.
I wanted to create something that solved a frustration I’ve seen everywhere in health software: the feeling that the product is talking to your insurance company, not to you.
THE PROBLEM
An archive of every health interaction, just chaotic.
No one is building for health
coherence, only health tracking.
I’ve worked with health products for years, and they all share the same flaw: they organize what you log, not what it means. Glucose readings, mood checks, medication reminders, insurance claims — every feature shouts in its own voice.
The team at da.care knew it. They also knew the stakes: in healthtech, a confusing UI isn’t just frustrating. It actively erodes the trust the product needs to do its job.
✗Disconnected data points feel like clutter, not insight
✗Requires manual cross-referencing across screens
✗Search is shallow; only finds keywords, not patterns
✗No tools for spotting trends or unusual behavior
✗Doesn't support real understanding of one's health
✗Trust is asked for, never earned
BEFORE — THE OLD DASHBOARD
Screenshot placeholder
Years of well-meaning features. Easy to log, hard to understand.
SOLUTION
A reflective health space that turns daily logs into clear understanding.
Introducing the
new dashboard.
We rebuilt the dashboard around a single principle: every screen should answer one question, not present every fact at once. Patterns surface naturally instead of needing to be hunted for.
The result is a product that feels like a thoughtful assistant — present when you need it, quiet when you don’t.
TRY PROTOTYPE →01 · MY HEALTH HOME
A calm overview of where you are. Patterns surface as gentle highlights — never alarms. The day's most relevant insight gets coral; everything else stays quiet.
02 · CARE PRODUCTS
Modular care, on your terms. Add or remove care products with a familiar shopping pattern. Each one earns its place in the dashboard.
03 · PROFILE & ACCOUNT
The boring stuff, made invisible. Account management lives where you'd expect, with anti-dark-pattern flows for cancellation, billing, and consent.
04 · PAYMENTS & BILLING
Honest billing, by design. Inspired by Adobe's recent FTC settlement, every billing flow is built to be unmistakably clear about what costs what, and when.
RESEARCH
I interviewed 14 patients and 6 clinicians about what made them trust — or distrust — a health product.
Trust isn’t a feature.
It’s the absence of friction.
What I found surprised me. Trust didn’t come from polish or branding. It came from things like clear cancellation flows, plain-language explanations, and quiet acknowledgment when something went wrong.
11/14
patients said dark-pattern billing made them distrust the entire product, not just the billing.
9/14
wanted insights, not just data — 'tell me what changed, not what I logged.'
6/6
clinicians valued tools that 'got out of the way' — quiet by default, surface only what's clinically relevant.
REFLECTION
What I learned from da.care.
The work continues.
The clearest signal that the redesign was working wasn’t a number. It was when patients started using the word ‘feels’ in feedback. ‘It feels lighter.’ ‘It feels like it’s on my side.’
Designing for health teaches you that the most generous thing you can do is build something that respects the user’s intelligence and protects their attention. Everything I make from here forward is shaped by that.
NEXT CASE STUDY
Mindful habits →