01 · Context
About 1MG — India's Trusted Health Platform
1MG is India's leading digital consumer healthcare platform — an online portal for ordering medicines and health products, booking lab tests, and accessing doctor consultations delivered at home.
It is counted among the most trusted health platforms in the country, operating at a scale where even small UX friction translates into large volumes of failed health transactions and eroded user trust. For a platform in this space, search isn't a feature — it's the critical path.
The strategic lens I brought to this work: 1MG users are often unwell, in a hurry, and unfamiliar with precise drug nomenclature. Designing search for a health platform requires a fundamentally different standard than designing search for e-commerce — because the cost of failure isn't a missed cart conversion. It's a person going without medication.
02 · The Problem
Three Compounding Search Failures
The existing 1MG search experience was failing users in three distinct and interlocking ways — each making the others worse.
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01
Users arrived from many sources — and got stuck immediately
People reached 1MG via social media, articles, and the home screen's Lab & Home section. The search experience hadn't been designed for these varied entry contexts — creating friction at the point of highest intent.
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02
Users couldn't find the right prescriptions or medicines
People searched for specific prescribed medicines by brand name, generic name, or partial spelling — and received irrelevant results, unexplained alternatives, or nothing. They were abandoning and calling pharmacies instead.
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03
High-value services were undiscoverable from search
Online Consultation and lab test booking were core to 1MG's business — but were consistently missed in the search experience, causing commercial leakage and a disconnected user journey.
03 · My Role
What I Was Responsible For
I led this project end-to-end — from discovery research through to high-fidelity prototype and design specification. As UX Lead, I was the single point of accountability for all research synthesis, design decision-making, and output quality on the search redesign.
- Research Strategy
- Desk Research
- User Interviews
- Persona Development
- Journey Mapping
- Competitive Analysis
- Concept Design
- Usability Testing
- Hi-Fi Prototype
- Design Handoff Specs
04 · Design Process
Double Diamond — Research Drove Every Phase
Given the health-critical context of the platform, no design decision could rest on assumption. I structured the work as a strict four-phase process, ensuring each stage was evidenced before the next began.
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01
Discover
Desk research, existing product analytics, and secondary market data to map the current landscape and identify the right questions to investigate.
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02
Define
User personas, journey maps, and a structured pain-point framework to frame the problem with precision before any solutions were considered.
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03
Ideate
User scenarios, stakeholder walkthroughs, and usability evaluation to generate and stress-test concepts — separating good ideas from assumptions before committing to visual design.
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04
Design
High-fidelity mockups addressing every documented pain point, validated through a targeted usability test session before final handoff.
05 · Discover
What the Research Revealed
I ran three research streams in parallel — desk research, secondary data analysis, and direct user interviews — to build a multi-dimensional picture of where and why the search experience was failing.
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Users are condition-driven, not product-drivenMany users were managing an illness or caring for someone with a chronic condition. They were searching for guidance and reassurance alongside products — meaning search needed to surface context, not just catalogue results.
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Lab & Home was a dominant but underserved entry pointA large proportion of users arrived via the Lab & Home section from the home screen — a high-intent context the search architecture had not been designed to support, creating immediate friction.
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Search was being used as multi-purpose navigationUsers searched for prescription medicines by name, browsed for condition-related products, and looked for Online Consultation — treating search as a universal gateway the platform had not built for.
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Prescription terminology was a consistent barrierUsers searched for brand-name medications but received generics or alternatives with no explanation. In a health context, an unexplained alternative creates anxiety — and abandonment. Trust, not just relevance, was the design problem.
06 · Define
Two Personas — Two Fundamentally Different Search Modes
Research synthesis produced two distinct user personas representing the dominant search behaviours. Every design decision in the solution was anchored to one or both of these personas — ensuring no feature was added without a named user who needed it.
- Goals
- Reorder specific prescribed medications quickly; confirm availability before pharmacy visit; reduce long-term medication costs through better pricing comparisons.
- Core Pain Points
- Can't find brand-name medicines easily; unexplained alternative results create anxiety; prescription upload is slow and unclear; low trust when results don't match his prescription exactly.
- Design Implication
- Search must handle brand-name queries, surface alternatives with clear labelling, and make prescription upload a primary — not buried — action.
- Goals
- Access medicines, lab tests, and consultations through one platform; make informed health decisions quickly; trust the platform enough to act on its recommendations.
- Core Pain Points
- Online Consultation is buried — not discoverable from search; health categories are confusing; the line between search and browse is unclear; booking feels disconnected from search results.
- Design Implication
- Search must surface consultations and lab tests for condition-related queries, and feel like a unified discovery tool — not a medicine-only directory.
07 · Ideate
Scenarios & Usability Testing — Before Any Visual Design
Before committing to any visual direction, I constructed detailed user scenarios to pressure-test the emerging design concepts. Two scenarios were particularly decisive:
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Scenario A — The Health Condition Journey (Monica)
Monica is a working professional managing a health condition across multiple apps, eventually arriving at 1MG. The scenario revealed that search results needed to surface condition context — guidance, related tests, and consultation options — not just a list of products. Users in a health-anxious state need reassurance, not just relevance.
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Scenario B — The Prescription Search Journey (Gaurav)
Gaurav is a 65-year-old managing multiple chronic conditions who discovered 1MG through a newspaper ad. He searched by prescription name, received an unfamiliar alternative with no explanation, and abandoned. This scenario made the case for labelled alternative results, clear composition disclosure, and inline prescription upload — all of which became non-negotiable design requirements.
Usability Evaluation — 4 Findings That Changed the Design
A 1-on-1 usability test session with a target-demographic participant was run on the wireframe prototype before high-fidelity work began. This session produced four specific, actionable design refinements:
Prescription upload CTA was invisibleThe upload trigger was not noticed. It needed to be a primary visual element on the search screen — not a secondary affordance discovered by exploration.
Autocomplete didn't handle misspellingsUsers typing at speed expected smart correction. Without it, imprecise queries returned dead ends. Fuzzy matching became a required capability.
Order cancellation was found too lateA navigational clarity issue surfacing through search — confirmed the broader hypothesis that the platform's structure was creating compounding confusion beyond just search results.
Online Consultation was never found through searchNot once during the session. This confirmed the research finding and hardened the requirement: consultation had to be surfaced as a first-class search result for relevant query types.
08 · Design Solution
Six Design Decisions — Each Traced to a Research Finding
Every change in the final design was deliberately traceable to a specific user insight. Nothing was added on assumption or aesthetic preference alone.
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Research Finding → Design Decision
Unified Search Across All Result Types
Medicines, lab tests, consultations, and wellness products are all surfaced through a single search bar with clear, labelled result type categories — eliminating the need to navigate before searching.
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Research Finding → Design Decision
Smart Search with Misspelling Tolerance
The search engine was redesigned to handle brand names, generic names, condition-based queries, and common misspellings — returning relevant results even from partial or imprecise input, critical for older users and first-time users on a health platform.
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Research Finding → Design Decision
Prescription Upload as a Primary Action
Prescription upload was repositioned as a prominent primary CTA on the search screen — visible immediately, without requiring navigation. Reduced steps between intent and action for the platform's most critical user task.
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Research Finding → Design Decision
Online Consultation in Search Results
Consultation was given a first-class result card that appears for condition-related and symptom-related queries — surfaced at exactly the moment a user's query signals they might need clinical help, not just a product.
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Research Finding → Design Decision
Labelled Alternative Medicine Results
When an exact brand match wasn't available, alternatives were displayed with clear explanatory labels — same composition, approved substitute, cost comparison — converting a trust-breaking moment into an informative one.
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Research Finding → Design Decision
Condition-Based Search Clusters
For condition-related queries, results were organised to show medicines, relevant lab tests, and consultation options together — treating the user's health need as a unified problem to solve, not a catalogue category to navigate.