I joined PharmAppy as its sole designer. There was no design system, the products had grown apart, and every pharmacy website was produced by hand through a slow back-and-forth.
As Lead Product Designer, I owned strategy, UX, UI, and front-end build across three web products: customer onboarding, an internal staff portal, and the marketing site.
Time to a first pharmacy website, depending on complexity.
Operations, support, content, and deployment in one place, used daily by the whole team.
The production marketing site, in Next.js, with no design-to-dev handoff.
Three web products on one shared system: the marketing site brings pharmacies in, onboarding turns them into live websites, and the staff portal runs the work behind both.
A first pharmacy website took two to seven days. Addresses, branch details, GPhC information, and design preferences arrived scattered across emails, so every build started with rounds of clarification.
I reframed the brief from “a website builder” to a guided onboarding that collects everything production needs up front. I scoped the smallest useful version, designed and built the flow, and iterated on internal and customer feedback. When automated generation proved unreliable, I switched to an approach the team could edit and maintain.
Structure over an open brief: customers follow a guided flow, so the team gets complete information on day one. Controlled editing: complex design and structure stay with the team, while customers review, comment in context, and make approved edits. Verified access: invitation-only, with an NHS ODS code and a one-time passcode, so every live site belongs to a real pharmacy.
First-version websites dropped from two to seven days to between two hours and one day.
Faster production starts upstream: structured information and feedback at the right moment matter as much as the website itself.
The team ran on 3+ disconnected tools for HR, CRM, projects, assets, deployment, email, and support, so routine work meant stitching context together by hand.
I mapped how the team actually worked, defined a first version around the workflows that kept crossing tools, and designed and built the portal myself. Shared, code-based tokens and components kept it consistent with the customer-facing products.
Build one focused product instead of configuring more tools. It costs more ownership to maintain, but it fits the team’s real workflows instead of forcing the team to fit the tools.
One system, used daily by the full team, with fewer overlapping subscriptions.
Consolidation is change management as much as design: adoption only sticks when the new system is genuinely faster than the old patchwork.
The old site didn’t make PharmAppy’s value, integrations, or outcomes clear to pharmacies evaluating it. The information existed, but not in the order a prospective customer needed it.
I designed and built the production site in Next.js, end to end: messaging, information architecture, visual design, responsive layouts, front-end build, and deployment.
Lead with pharmacy outcomes and NHS integration credibility, and answer the first questions before anything else. The first release didn’t try to publish every page; deeper detail lives one click away in product, documentation, and integration pages.
Pharmacy teams can understand the offer quickly and find the proof behind it.
A marketing site earns trust fastest when the first screen answers the core question and deeper proof is easy to find.
Appy Intelligence, the documentation site, and the integrations page.
When off-the-shelf tools ran out during the website build, I built my own.
See the Mini Tools case studyTunes orbital icon motion and exports code-ready visuals for the site — faster than hand-tuning keyframes.
Generates shimmer and jitter grid treatments that copy straight into the site as brand assets.
Owning design through deployment removed handoff friction, but forced ruthless scope and sequencing to keep shipping.
If I started again, I’d build the shared design system, with its documentation and rules, much earlier — for the team, for me, and for the agents working with us. Without it from day one, the products drifted apart.
Next: a redesign of the core pharmacy web app, which isn’t public yet.
