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Forward CarePod: A doctor's office, without the doctor
Designing the clinical experiences inside Forward's CarePod: a fully self-operated health clinic.
BTW, this is an overview. If you’d like to learn more or view the case study, please reach out.
Forward's CarePod is a standalone, self-operated clinic with no receptionist, no waiting room, no physician in the room. Members book an appointment, walk in, and run their own visit: blood pressure checks, body scans, lab work, skin assessments. The CarePod handles everything a primary care visit might, through a floor-to-ceiling touchscreen and a suite of integrated medical hardware.
An 8-foot touchscreen clinic doesn't have an interaction model to borrow from. We built one from first principles, finding unexpected inspiration in parallel references — the McDonald's self-order kiosk among them.
I had the privilege of "choreographing" several of the core clinical experiences inside it — reach out to learn more!
Self serve check in
Members arrive expecting a nurse. I designed the check-in experience that replaces that moment — and had to earn the same trust. The edge cases were where the real design work lived: how do you turn someone away gracefully? What happens when a member shows up early? Each scenario required a response that felt considered, not mechanical.
Dermatascope: Skin cancer scanner
One of the more unexpected challenges: guiding a member to use a medical device to photograph their own skin concerns — including rashes in hard-to-reach places. How do you ask someone to take their shirt off and photograph their upper back without it feeling clinical or awkward? The answer was in tone, sequencing, and making every instruction feel like it came from a trusted friend rather than a medical form.
Self-serve blood draw
Perhaps the most high-stakes experience I designed was guiding members to draw their own blood unassisted. The design had to project complete confidence without false ease to empower users to take their blood into their own hands… literally!
The only video I have of this experience is a demo of my coworker voluntarily giving away his blood below haha.
Choreographing a dance
Designing for the CarePod felt less like traditional product work and more like composing the steps between a user, a space, and a machine. Someone reaches for a device, a screen responds, the space shifts around them — each of those is a beat, and the whole sequence falls apart if even one transition feels off.
But more importantly, making a user feel empowered isn't something you simply design onto a screen. Instead, it's the result of every interaction decision that signals to a user that they can do this on their own. And that only works if the designer actually trusts their user to take the lead.