Akbar Khan Hospital
Community-focused healthcare system

Akbar Khan Hospital — Healthcare UX and Service

How Phoenux reframed a hospital's digital experience around the people it serves.

What we delivered

What we did

Service Design, Healthcare UX, User Research, Journey Mapping, Information Architecture, Brand Strategy, UI/UX Design, Design System

Project snapshot

Engagement: 7 Months
Platform: Offline & Digital Experience + Brand System
Industry: Healthcare

Overview

Designing for healthcare beyond the screen

Akbar Khan Hospital serves a diverse community with different needs, expectations, and levels of familiarity with healthcare systems. The challenge wasn't simply that the hospital's website looked outdated. The bigger question was: How should a hospital communicate, guide, and serve the community across digital and physical touchpoints?

Before designing anything, Phoenux looked at the experience around the hospital — how patients find information, how families make decisions, what creates uncertainty, how services are understood, and where the existing experience created friction.

The goal was to understand the real problems within the healthcare environment and design solutions that made sense for the people, the hospital, and the regional context.

Challenges

Healthcare design starts with understanding people

A hospital experience is shaped by far more than a website. Patients may be anxious, unfamiliar with medical terminology, or visiting for the first time. Families often make decisions on behalf of others. Doctors and staff have completely different information needs. And unlike many digital products, healthcare experiences exist within a physical environment with regional constraints.

We needed to account for:

•Different patient demographics and digital familiarity
•Information that needs to be understood quickly
•The emotional state of patients and families
•Existing hospital operations and physical environments
•Regional expectations and real healthcare needs
•Future services the hospital needed to accommodate

The challenge was to create an experience that worked within the reality of the hospital, rather than designing an idealised digital product in isolation.

Perspective shift

The website wasn't the problem. The experience was.

Instead of asking: “How should the hospital website look?” We asked: “What does this community actually need from the hospital?” That changed the direction of the project.

We looked at the experience from the patient's perspective — before arriving, while searching for care, finding the right doctor or service, understanding information, and deciding what to do next.

This helped us identify where design could reduce uncertainty, improve access to information, and make the hospital feel more approachable. Design became a service problem before it became a visual problem.

Transformation

From delivering assets to designing the right experience

Phoenux worked closely with hospital leadership, doctors, architecture and operations teams, and other stakeholders to understand how the hospital actually functions.

[ METRIC: number of stakeholder interviews, or departments consulted ]

Rather than treating each deliverable as a separate design task, we connected the pieces. We considered:

•Patient needs
•Hospital operations
•Physical environment
•Regional context
•Brand perception
•Digital behavior
•Future growth

This allowed us to frame solutions around the service itself, with the website and visual identity becoming tools to support that experience.

Solution

Designing around the real healthcare journey.

Our work began with understanding where patients and the community experienced friction. We mapped key journeys, examined how information was structured, and evaluated the relationship between the hospital's physical and digital experiences.

Understand the community

We studied the people AKH needed to serve and the situations they were navigating.

•Identify different patient and family needs
•Understand information-seeking behavior
•Map key healthcare journeys
•Identify moments of uncertainty and friction

Understand the environment

The solution had to work within the hospital's existing physical and operational reality.

•Consider regional healthcare expectations
•Align digital experiences with physical spaces
•Understand operational constraints
•Identify opportunities for better information access

Frame the right solutions

Instead of jumping directly into screens, we prioritized problems and translated them into service opportunities.

•Restructure information around user needs
•Simplify key patient journeys
•Create clearer service and doctor discovery
•Define a scalable experience framework

Bring the experience to life

Only after the strategic foundation was established did we move into execution.

•Digital brand direction
•Patient-focused website experience
•Information architecture
•UI/UX design
•Design system
•Content and visual direction
•Supporting visual assets
The assets were the final expression of a much larger service design process.

Website hero — Your Health, Our Commitment

From insight to experience

Designing within regional and physical constraints

That influenced everything from the color palette and typography to content hierarchy and interaction patterns.

The experience was designed to:

•Make information easier to understand
•Reduce visual and cognitive clutter
•Communicate credibility without feeling clinical
•Help users move through decisions with confidence

The goal wasn't to make health commerce feel more persuasive. It was to make it feel more trustworthy.

Designing for reassurance

Making healthcare feel easier to navigate

Healthcare can already be overwhelming.

Our role was to remove unnecessary cognitive load wherever possible. We focused on:

•Clearer information hierarchy
•More accessible typography and contrast
•Simpler navigation
•Familiar interaction patterns
•More understandable healthcare content
•Reduced friction across important journeys

The objective wasn't to make the interface impressive. It was to make the next step feel obvious.

Brand meets service

Giving the hospital an identity that reflects its care

Once the experience strategy was clear, the visual identity could support it. The brand direction needed to communicate the same qualities we wanted from the service:

Trust. Clarity. Care. Modernity.

The identity was then carried across digital and physical touchpoints, creating a more cohesive experience between what patients see online and what they encounter at the hospital.

The result

A digital experience grounded in the real world

The project gave AKH more than a redesigned digital presence. It created a foundation for a healthcare experience that is:

More patient-centered

Designed around real patient and family needs.

Easier to navigate

Information and services are structured around clearer journeys.

[ METRIC: findability or task-completion improvement, e.g. time to find a doctor or department, before → after ]

Regionally relevant

Solutions reflect the community and healthcare environment AKH operates within.

Connected across touchpoints

Digital and physical experiences work together rather than independently.

Built to evolve

A scalable design foundation supports future services and growth.

Value Phoenux added

The biggest value wasn't the website, the identity, or the design system individually.

It was figuring out what AKH needed to become for its community and then designing the tools to make that possible.

Phoenux brought together service thinking, research, regional context, physical constraints, UX, and design to turn a complex healthcare challenge into a clearer experience.

The assets came last. The thinking came first.