Co-founder & Design Lead · Healthnook · 2013
A health insurance marketplace built for people, not brokers
Branding
Healthnook & InsuredLife Brand System
Two brands from scratch — Healthnook as the consumer-facing platform and InsuredLife as the in-house insurance agency sub-brand. Approachable, trustworthy, and nothing like a typical insurance product.
Branding
Healthnook & InsuredLife Brand System
Two brands from scratch — Healthnook as the consumer-facing platform and InsuredLife as the in-house insurance agency sub-brand. Approachable, trustworthy, and nothing like a typical insurance product.
Website
Marketing Site
The first thing a confused, first-time insurance shopper would see — designed to feel nothing like an insurance site. Approachable in tone, minimal in layout, structured to answer real questions before asking users to do anything.
Website
Marketing Site
The first thing a confused, first-time insurance shopper would see — designed to feel nothing like an insurance site. Approachable in tone, minimal in layout, structured to answer real questions before asking users to do anything.
Product
Marketplace Application
The real UX challenge — turning a genuinely complex product into something a non-expert could compare, evaluate, and act on. Full comparison interface, plan detail views, and enrollment flow, with the front-end built in-house.
Millions of people suddenly shopping for insurance alone for the first time
In 2013, the Affordable Care Act upended the US health insurance market. Millions of Americans had to shop for plans on their own for the first time — and the experience waiting for them was confusing, cold, and built for insurance brokers, not people.
The opportunity was clear: build something that felt like a consumer fintech product rather than a government portal. The challenge was equally clear — health insurance is genuinely complex, and getting the UX wrong in a high-stakes decision context doesn't just frustrate users, it costs them real money.
Consumer-first design in a category that had never tried it
I co-founded Healthnook and led all design — brand identity, marketing site, and the full marketplace application. The brand was built around the idea of modern health, family values, and genuine trustworthiness: approachable without being frivolous, clear without being cold.
The marketplace was where the real UX challenge lived. Turning health insurance — a product category notorious for complexity — into something a non-expert could compare, evaluate, and act on required careful information architecture and a comparison interface that reduced cognitive load at every step. I designed and built the front-end myself.
- Full brand identity and visual system for Healthnook — logo, color, type, guidelines
- InsuredLife sub-brand designed and positioned within the same brand architecture
- Consumer marketing site — architecture, design, copywriting direction, and front-end
- Marketplace application — plan browse, compare, and enroll — designed and built in-house
$6M in revenue — proof that design differentiates in high-friction markets
Healthnook generated $6M in revenue during its operating year and demonstrated that consumer-friendly design could meaningfully differentiate in a category that had historically ignored the end user. The platform worked — clear, functional, and trusted by the people navigating one of the most consequential financial decisions of their year.
After a year of operation, we made the decision to shift focus when a compelling opportunity opened up with eTags.com. The Healthnook platform remained a proof of concept for what thoughtful product design can do in a high-friction, high-stakes market.
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