There’s a moment in almost every project where the design brain wants to sprint.
You can see the layout in your head. You want to make it clean and simple, and ready to ship.
And then you remember that simple is not the same as clear.
Clear starts with listening.
We talk about user-centered design, but in healthcare it’s really listening-centered design.
It’s easy to treat listening like a phase: a meeting, a questionnaire.
But the kind of listening that helps people is ongoing. It shows up after the first draft, when you learn what looked fine on the page still isn’t easy for the reader.
So I come back to a few questions:
- What is the reader trying to do?
- What could go wrong if they misunderstand this?
- What is the easiest next step we can support?
Not opinions about color. Not personal preferences.
I’m paying attention to where health information breaks down. That first “wait, what does that mean?” moment.
Because if confusion hits early, people disengage. They skim, guess, or stop.
When I find that moment, I treat it as a design problem, not a reader problem. Sometimes the content is technically accurate, but it demands too much: too much reading, too many steps.
I think of listening as empathy, but it also works like quality control. It helps you see where the effort is hiding.
Healthcare materials often answer the official question, but the reader may be holding a different one:
- Is this serious?
- What happens next?
- How do I do this without messing it up?
- When should I call?
When design listens, those questions stop being invisible.
The question I keep asking as I work is whether this reduces effort or adds more.
Before I commit to layout, I ask:
- What is the one thing the reader needs to do after this?
- What could they misunderstand in the first 30 seconds?
- What word or step feels intimidating?
- What are the immediate “yes, but…” questions?
- What can we remove without losing meaning?
- Will this still work with assistive tech and low vision?
You don’t need a perfect process to use this. You just need to slow down long enough to ask.
Listening is sometimes treated like a soft skill. In healthcare, it’s a way to lower risk.
When people misunderstand, it’s rarely because they don’t care. It’s often because the material asked too much, too quickly, in language that didn’t match their reality.
Listening-centered design makes fewer assumptions.
And it makes the next step clearer and more manageable.
