Viscera
Designing trusted healthcare information systems for Black women.
A human-centered design project exploring how digital platforms can improve trust, transparency, and access to culturally responsive healthcare.
Team: Team Vital (Sarayah Obonyo, Fanny Mai, Marco Jim, & Moniyat Chowdhury)
Recognition: University of Washington Social Justice & Social Impact Award
Why This Project Matters to Me
Viscera represents a defining moment in both my academic and personal journey.
I worked on this project during the period surrounding my open-heart surgery for Takayasu's arteritis. Navigating the healthcare system as a patient while simultaneously designing a platform intended to improve healthcare experiences gave this work a perspective I could never have gained from textbooks alone.
Looking back, I now see Viscera as the project that first introduced me to the questions that continue to shape my research today: trust, health information quality, patient voice, and equitable healthcare design.
It taught me that patient-centered technology is not simply about building better interfaces. It is about designing information systems that help people feel heard, respected, and empowered to participate in their own care.
Receiving the University of Washington Social Justice & Social Impact Award for this work reinforced my commitment to advancing equitable, trustworthy, and patient-centered healthcare through research.
Viscera was an undergraduate human-centered design project that explored how digital health platforms can better support Black women navigating a healthcare system where implicit bias continues to shape patient experiences and outcomes.
Our team designed a community-driven platform that combined trusted provider recommendations, culturally informed patient reviews, insurance transparency, and peer support into a single experience.
Although Viscera began as a design project, it became the beginning of my interest in patient-centered research and health information systems. It challenged me to think beyond interfaces and ask how information influences trust, healthcare decisions, and patient outcomes.
Project Overview
Healthcare disparities are well documented, but statistics alone rarely capture the lived reality behind them.
Black women continue to report having their symptoms dismissed, their pain minimized, and their concerns overlooked. These experiences contribute to poorer health outcomes, delayed care, and deep mistrust of the healthcare system. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women.
Stories such as Serena Williams' near-fatal postpartum complications, where her concerns were initially dismissed despite her medical history, illustrate a broader pattern that many Black women have described for decades.
Our guiding question became:
How might Black women attain fair medical treatment so that they can have a quality, non-discriminatory healthcare experience?
The Challenge
Our research revealed that traditional physician review platforms often emphasize logistical details such as parking, wait times, and office facilities while providing very little information about the quality of doctor-patient interactions.
User interviews showed that many participants relied heavily on recommendations from family, friends, and their communities when searching for healthcare providers. Trust, empathy, and feeling heard consistently mattered more than convenience.
User testing also revealed that participants almost always navigated directly to patient reviews before reading provider biographies. This insight led us to redesign the platform around communication, trust, empathy, and verified patient experiences rather than traditional provider profiles.
Research Insights
Because Viscera centered deeply personal healthcare experiences, ethical design became a core consideration throughout the project.
We prioritized patient privacy, respectful community participation, and responsible stewardship of sensitive health information because trust cannot exist without thoughtful information practices.
Information Ethics
Viscera Final Demo
Our Solution
Rather than creating another physician directory, our team designed Viscera as a trusted healthcare ecosystem built around the needs and lived experiences of Black women.
Every design decision was informed by user research and centered on one goal: helping patients make healthcare decisions with greater confidence by providing trustworthy information, meaningful community support, and greater transparency throughout the care journey.
The platform combined four core experiences that worked together to support patients before, during, and after finding a healthcare provider.
Community-Led Forums
Healthcare decisions are rarely made in isolation. Viscera's moderated forums gave Black women a space to ask questions, share experiences, discuss discrimination, exchange resources, and support one another — recognizing lived experience as a valuable source of health knowledge.
Patient-Centered Provider Profiles
Profiles moved beyond credentials to highlight what participants told us mattered most: communication, empathy, listening, patient recommendations, and insurance compatibility — helping patients understand not just what a provider does, but what it feels like to receive care from them.
Meaningful Patient Reviews
Viscera redesigned the review experience to capture what patients actually care about — whether they felt respected, believed, and listened to. Reviews evaluated provider communication, bedside manner, empathy, cultural sensitivity, and overall patient experience.
Transparent Healthcare Information
Viscera brought insurance compatibility, provider specialties, and community recommendations into a single experience — reducing the need to search across multiple disconnected websites.
Designing for Trust
Trust is built through information.
When patients have access to meaningful information, authentic community experiences, and providers who demonstrate empathy and respect, they are better equipped to navigate healthcare with confidence. Rather than simply helping users locate a physician, Viscera sought to help them find a healthcare environment where they felt heard, respected, and safe.
Human-Centered Design · UX Research · Qualitative Research · User Interviews · Persona Development · Usability Testing · Health Information Design · Information Ethics · Patient-Centered Design · Digital Health · Health Equity · Collaborative Product Development