Designing a patient ordering platform for the UK’s leading home enteral nutrition service.
Abbott Nutrition has been supporting enterally fed patients across the UK for 25 years. Their Hospital2Home service coordinates the delivery of nutritional feed and equipment directly to people’s homes — patients who, in many cases, cannot eat any other way. A tube, a pump, a monthly delivery. For thousands of patients and their carers, this is a lifeline.
Abbott had built a digital platform to manage this. It wasn’t working.
The problem was a broken loop
Users would start an order, hit a wall of confusing navigation or unclear form logic, abandon the attempt, and call the support line to finish what the platform couldn’t. Staff fielded calls that should never have come in, while managing the fallout from incomplete orders: wrong stock, delayed deliveries, corrupted logistics.
The research revealed something more troubling. Because users didn’t trust the platform to complete their order reliably, they over-ordered when they did get through by phone. Orders spoiled. Stock was wasted. The support line was clogged with anxiety-driven calls from people who had already had one bad experience and weren’t prepared to risk running out of the only nutrition keeping them or their family member alive.
The platform wasn’t just failing to help. It was actively making things worse.
Defining the problem before solving it
There was no clean handover. A leadership transition at Abbott meant institutional knowledge was scattered — the people who had commissioned the original build were no longer in the room. I had to excavate research from across the organisation rather than receive it, and where gaps existed, I conducted my own: user interviews and paper-testing with a carefully recruited group of patients, carers, care home workers and healthcare professionals.
The unifying factor was fragility. Every user in this system was operating under some form of pressure — time, anxiety, clinical dependency, or all three. The platform’s job was not to be interesting. It was to get out of the way.
As the project progressed, the stakeholder group expanded. New voices, new priorities, new versions of what the platform should be. Against this, I held one fixed point of reference: the user most likely to fail. Someone recently discharged from hospital, managing a feeding tube at home for the first time. Someone anxious, time-poor, and in no position to navigate complexity. That user became the design constraint that overrode every other pressure.
Restraint as rigour
The answer was subtraction. Deliberate, argued-for, defended-at-every-review subtraction.
The platform needed to feel like infrastructure. The visual register of a government service — the register that says this works, you are in the right place, we will not distract you. Clean type on white. The Abbott palette, nothing more. No introductory copy. No marketing noise. Whitespace doing the work that confidence does.
Navigation reduced to five tasks. The flow made inevitable — each step leading so naturally to the next that completing an order demands no more cognitive load than it absolutely must.
This required argument. A stakeholder-heavy project accumulates demands for visibility: someone always wants to fill the space, justify the investment in pixels, make the brand felt. The case for subtraction had to be made repeatedly, and backed by research. In a healthcare context, every unnecessary element is friction between a user and the task they came to do. Friction here has clinical consequences.
What changed
The difference was immediate.
Support call volume dropped. Orders completed end-to-end without intervention. Stock data became trustworthy because the behaviour distorting it — the anxious over-ordering, the abandoned sessions — had stopped. Abbott promoted the platform heavily. They were proud of it.
A system that had been haemorrhaging money and eroding patient confidence simply started working. And the people responsible for delivering nutrition to some of the most vulnerable patients in the country could get on with doing exactly that.
