Upcoming Talk - FREE!

This Thursday, August 14, I’ll be partnering with Rellia to provide insights on UX Research and healthcare start ups.

You're building healthcare products that need to work for real patients and providers, but how do you know if you're on the right track?

​Join Janna, a seasoned UX researcher with 20 years of experience in health tech to see how user research actually works in practice.

​We'll start with a real case study from a healthcare startup that used research to dramatically improve their onboarding - and the impressive numbers that followed. Then we'll break down the decisions behind the research: how they chose the right methods, found the right participants, and turned insights into action.

​Walk away understanding when research makes sense for your startup and when it's time to bring in expert help.

Quick Survey, Big Industry Insights

Healthcare startups face unique challenges. We're gathering insights from founders like you to understand what's really happening in the trenches. This 8-minute survey will help us create better resources for the community—and we'll share all findings publicly in September.

Ready to contribute?

The Tale of Two Devices Cefaly: A UX Disaster

I decided to try Cefaly for my migraines—$400 out of pocket since insurance doesn't cover these devices. The promise seemed reasonable: a small device that delivers electrical stimulation to potentially reduce migraine frequency.

But using Cefaly felt like punishment on top of pain. Every single session required manually pairing the device via Bluetooth—imagine fumbling with connection settings when you already have a migraine. The intensity controls were baffling: you could turn the stimulation up, but inexplicably, not back down. If you went too high, your only option was to restart the entire session.

The app included a diary feature to track sessions and symptoms—actually a smart idea for chronic conditions. But, the device couldn't automatically log when you used it. After each session, while dealing with a migraine, I was supposed to manually open the app and enter that I'd just completed treatment. Most users won't do that. Users in pain definitely won't do that.

When I called customer service frustrated after weeks of issues I honestly thought were just my misunderstanding, the representative immediately knew every issue I mentioned. 'Oh yes,' she said, 'we’ve heard these complaints before.' They knew. They just weren't fixing it.

Three months later, with no improvement in my migraines and daily frustration with the device, I returned it for a full refund. The contrast with Nerivio was stark—their device paired automatically, logged your sessions automatically and had intuitive controls that actually worked when you're not at your best.

Key Learnings for Wearables

1. Automate Everything You Can If your device knows something happened (like completing a session), don't make users manually log it. Pain patients especially won't maintain manual data entry habits when they're symptomatic.

2. Design for Your Users' Worst Days Bluetooth pairing might be trivial when you're healthy, but it's a significant barrier when you're in pain, cognitively impaired, or dealing with symptoms. Every interaction should work when users are at their most vulnerable.

3. Customer Service Insights Must Drive Product Fixes When support teams know exactly what problems users face repeatedly, that's not just a training issue—it's a product design emergency. User pain points revealed through support calls should be the highest priority UX fixes.

4. Early UXR with Real Patients Prevents Expensive Mistakes Basic user research with actual migraine patients—not healthy engineers or focus groups—would have revealed these fundamental usability failures before manufacturing thousands of devices. Testing the pairing process with someone mid-migraine, or observing how pain affects fine motor control during intensity adjustments, costs pennies compared to post-launch customer service complaints, returns, and the reputation damage of being known as "the device that's harder to use than the migraine itself." The Cefaly team clearly gathered this feedback eventually (hence customer service knowing all the problems), but by then they were looking at expensive hardware redesigns and firmware updates instead of simple design pivots during development.