Epic UX Summer Internship
Reimagining Health Summaries for Patients, One Widget at a Time
UX DESIGN
UI DESIGN
During the summer of 2022, I interned as a UX designer at Epic Systems in Madison, Wisconsin. I was paired with a software developer intern, and together we fully owned a project for Epic’s patient-facing app, MyChart.
At the start of the summer, my partner and I were tasked with updating an existing page in MyChart called Health Summary—both its front-end design and back-end functionality needed a refresh.
To solve our problem we followed the Double Diamond design process model.
To kick off the project, I dove into the current Health Summary page in MyChart. From the jump, it was clear that the page was dense, text-heavy, and overwhelming—especially for patients looking for a quick health overview.
We knew we couldn’t just clean up the UI—we had to understand the user’s mental model of what a health summary should even be.
I created a research activity that included both 1:1 interviews and a build-your-own summary task. This allowed participants to talk through their expectations and then visually assemble their ideal Health Summary from a provided set of cards (e.g. medications, allergies, test results, etc.).
After analyzing our research, we aligned on the core issue: the Health Summary page needed more than a facelift—it needed a strategic redesign to better serve users.
After we defined the project, I began sketching wireframes. The initial ideas I had centered around how to display all the information that is currently on Health Summary without the tabs.
Just as we were preparing to move forward, we hit a turning point. Feedback revealed that the Health Summary didn’t have a clearly defined purpose in its current state—the issue ran deeper than visuals or layout. So instead of progressing to final designs, we looped back into the problem space. It became clear that to create something truly useful, we needed to redefine the scope, even if it meant expanding beyond our original assignment.
At this stage, it was clear we needed to zoom out. The original "redesign the Health Summary page" prompt didn’t capture the complexity of the real issue. The page wasn’t just outdated—it lacked a clear purpose. So, my partner and I hit pause and dove deeper.
This is when our project evolved into something bigger, eventually earning a new name: Health Hub.
We started from scratch—asking bigger questions, exploring user needs in more depth, and reframing the problem entirely.
How might we give patients a holistic overview of their health so that they can understand the big picture and take proactive steps to manage their care?
With a focused problem statement and clear user goals in place, I jumped back into ideation—this time with sharper direction.
A modular Health Hub made up of individual widgets, each summarizing a different category of health data (like medications, preventive care, conditions, etc.).
I led the visual exploration and widget layout design, experimenting with how to make complex medical data glanceable but still meaningful. There was lots of trial and error and many many design feedback sessions.
With just a few days left in my internship, I led a guerrilla-style usability test to validate the Health Hub design with real users. My goal was to check if the core interactions were intuitive and if the overall concept made sense.
10 Epic employees who are also active MyChart users
Each participant completed 3 short tasks using a clickable prototype. Afterward, they took a short adjective-based survey to capture their overall impressions of the page.
As my internship wrapped up, I had a clear vision for how Health Hub could continue evolving. With more time, I would’ve explored:
