Desmond Garden
Building UnitedHealthcare's first integrated wellness marketplace — for 18 million members, through two major pivots, with a team brought in after the engineers were already waiting.
When we joined the project, the product requirements were already written, the engineers were already assembled, and everyone was waiting on design.
That's a particular kind of pressure that doesn't get discussed much in portfolio reviews. There was no runway for extensive discovery. No time to question the strategic framing. The brief was locked, the delivery schedule was two-week sprints for a full year, and my team of five — four UX designers and a content writer — needed to hit the ground without losing our footing.
The product itself was genuinely new territory for UHC: the company's first integrated wellness marketplace, built to give members a single place to browse, purchase, and manage health products and digital wellness subscriptions on top of their existing insurance plan. Before UHC Store, members navigated a fragmented landscape — multiple external platforms, no centralized payment wallet, and wellness programs selected at the employer level rather than personalized to the individual. The opportunity was real. The execution window was narrow.
The scope was an end-to-end shopping experience: browsable departments and categories, product detail pages with pricing variants, cart and checkout with a centralized payment wallet, subscription management, and order history. An MVP in name, but designed deliberately to scale — every core component, from product cards to checkout, was architected to support multi-product purchasing and future benefits personalization, not just the single-item flow shipping at launch.
Our first act was alignment, not design. I led the team in translating the requirements into a high-level happy path journey — a complete end-to-end flow mapping every state from store entry through post-purchase — and brought product, engineering, business, and design together in an on-site to walk through it together before anyone opened Figma. Getting that shared mental model in place early was the investment that made the sprint pace survivable.
After the product team finalized the initial list of offerings, we partnered with a content designer, a researcher, and a clinical expert to figure out how members would actually navigate a health product marketplace. The instinct in most e-commerce is to organize by product type. Health is messier — "fitness" and "mental health" and "prenatal care" don't sort themselves neatly. Usability testing revealed that members needed two levels of categorization to orient themselves: departments (L1) and categories (L2). We ran two tree tests to land on language that felt navigable rather than clinical, and the taxonomy that came out of that process became the architecture of the store.
The hardest design problems
Two pivots, one launch date
Directed a team of four UX designers and one content writer across a year of two-week sprints — establishing working rhythms, managing workload across parallel feature tracks, and maintaining design quality under sustained delivery pressure.
Led the happy path on-site that brought design, product, engineering, and business stakeholders into shared understanding of the end-to-end experience before detailed design began. Established the foundation that kept the team aligned through both pivots.
Navigated the store entry legal requirements through multiple rounds of user testing and stakeholder sessions, translating five separate agreements into a two-step entry flow that satisfied compliance and preserved the member experience.
Directed the extension of UHC's retail product card component for the marketplace use case — ensuring the new component integrated cleanly into the existing design system and was built to serve future product contexts, not just this one.