Kristen Jolly

Multidisciplinary designer translating ideas into clear, compelling experiences.
Read about me

Currently seeking Summer 2026 Internships.
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Work
CareMate
Toronto Gong Fu Cha Fest
Co—Star Redesign
Jolly Bean Cafe

Playground
Cereal Box Design
YorkU Postcards

CareMate

2025

Overview

We built a healthcare management and coordination app that connects patients and their caregivers with healthcare providers and provides consistent, accessible communication to both patients and their caregivers.

Role
User Research
Prototyping
Product Design

Team
Project Lead (Me)
UI Designer - Grazielle Arcamo
UX Researcher - Sophia Han

Tools
Figma

Timeline
3 Months

Background

Ontario’s healthcare system is currently facing a rise of aging demographics and systemic resource shortages. As public infrastructure struggles to keep pace, the responsibility of care is shifting heavily onto the shoulders of family members, often without the tools they need to manage it.

System At Its Limit
The provincial healthcare system is grappling with significant financial and staffing pressures that directly impact patient experience.

Long Term Care Homes
For many aging Ontarians, the transition to professional long-term care is increasingly out of reach, forcing families to manage complex medical needs at home.

Family Caregivers
With professional systems failing to meet demand, family members have become the primary providers of care, often at the cost of their own well-being.

Problem

Communication gaps between healthcare providers, patients, and caregivers lead to fragmented care, missed updates, and coordination challeneges, especially for patients with multiple caregivers. Existing systems lack a streamlined way to share critical information, schedule appointments, and ensure caregivers stay informed.

HMW

How might we empower caregivers and patients to seamlessley coordinate appointments, updates, and communication with their entire healthcare network?

Research

To understand the friction points in Ontario’s healthcare management, we conducted a medium-scale qualitative study focusing on the ‘triangle of care’: patients, family caregivers, and healthcare professionals.

User Interviews
We utilized a multi-stakeholder approach to ensure our solution served the entire care ecosystem by conducting in-depth interviews with 11 participants.

4 Older Adults:
To understand their desire for independence and daily management hurdles.

4 Family Caregivers:
To uncover the emotional and logistical "burnout" of managing care from afar.

3 Healthcare Workers:
To identify systemic communication gaps and the "silos" of information.

Research Insights
Our synthesis process revealed several insights as to what can prevent efficient healthcare management but these are the ones we targeted. View our FigJam here.

Provider Communication
Efficient communication between providers would help streamline information that can allow the patient to understand their healthcare needs.

Technology as an Alternative
Many rarely use technology to manage their healthcare. An interface catered to their needs would improve communication and accessibility.

Appointment Management
Most struggle managing their frequent appointments and need a more convenient and simpler way to schedule them.

Design Process

By conducting multiple rounds of usability testing, we isolated and addressed key pain points regarding navigation, data security, and information hierarchy to ensure our final design met the high-stakes needs of the healthcare sector.

This was how the usability testing process affected the onboarding userflow:

Simpler Onboarding
By eliminating optional onboarding features, the onboarding process became 20% quicker, ensuring fast and easy onboarding.

The Importance of Copy
Confusing copy or placeholder copy made the users confused about the intention of the screen and its functions.

Confirmation is Key
When having user input fields, inclusion of titles helps the user remember what to enter, especially in long forms.

Solution

Introducing CareMate, a healthcare management and coordination app that connects patients and their caregivers with healthcare providers and provides consistent, accessible communication to both patients and their caregivers.

Our app bridges communication gaps in healthcare by providing a centralized platform for real-time updates, secure messaging, and caregiver coordination. By enabling direct communication from providers and allowing multiple caregivers to manage appointments collaboratively, it enhances care efficiency, improves patient outcomes, and simplifies caregiving.

Secure and informational onboarding

Accessible appointment management for caregivers and patients

Caregiver coordination and accompaniment

Secure and accessible coordination

Next Steps

While the current prototype addresses the core "communication gap," future development would focus on deepening the ecosystem integration:

Telehealth Integration Moving from a "connection" model to a seamless API integration with major Ontario telehealth providers.

Enhanced Visual Feedback
Implementing more robust visual indicators for system feedback as recommended during our final round of user testing.

Multi-Lingual Support Expanding the live translation features to fully support users who prefer managing care in their native language.

Takeaways

The Importance of Synthesis
We learned that the "synthesis process" is the most critical stage; focusing too much on minor details can initially obscure obvious patterns in user behavior.

Collaborative Design
Working in a group allowed us to pool different research takeaways, leading to a more holistic understanding of the problem than any of us could have achieved alone.

Systemic Empathy
Through interviews with healthcare workers, we gained a perspective on the systemic pressures (like doctor shortages and burnout) that contribute to the unsatisfactory experiences of patients and caregivers.