HealthCast

Turning Walgreens from a transactional pharmacy experience into a more proactive health and wellness platform.

Walgreens wanted to evolve beyond prescriptions and purchases and create a more personalized health and wellness experience. I helped define the product vision, engagement strategy, and experience framework for HealthCast — a mobile concept built around personalized health alerts, wellness content, activity prompts, and contextual recommendations.

Person holding a phone showing the myWalgreens app home screen with refill, local health alert, and Walgreens Cash rewards cards

Sign-ups: 79M
App engagement: +26%
Revenue per member: +4%

Client: Walgreens
Timeframe: 24 weeks
Role: UX Lead & Researcher
Team: Creative VP · Visual Designers · Project Manager · Product Manager
Platform: Mobile App

The Challenge

Walgreens had an opportunity to move beyond a primarily transactional pharmacy and retail experience and create stronger ongoing engagement around health and wellness.

Customer

The app was primarily focused on prescriptions and purchases rather than ongoing wellness needs.

Business

Walgreens wanted to expand its role from reactive care to proactive wellness and increase recurring app engagement.

Experience

Wellness content, rewards, services, and commerce needed to feel connected and relevant rather than promotional.

My Role

I helped shape the strategy, align the team, and stay close enough to the work to make the direction tangible.

I led

Product vision and UX direction
Engagement strategy
Experience framework
Research direction and synthesis

I facilitated

Cross-functional alignment
Strategy conversations
Prioritization around customer and business needs

I did

Concept development
Experience flows
Detailed UX exploration
Research synthesis

My role was not limited to directing the work. I also created frameworks, explored concepts, and worked directly in the experience when hands-on contribution helped the team move faster or gain clarity.

The Shift

Step 1: We started with
A pharmacy and retail app centered primarily around transactions.
Step 2: We saw an opportunity to
Create recurring engagement through personalized wellness triggers tied to environmental, behavioral, and community health signals.
Step 3: We shifted toward
A proactive wellness ecosystem connecting health content, services, rewards, and commerce through contextual experiences.

What I Changed

The strategy came to life through three major moves.

Built a proactive wellness model

We identified an opportunity to create more meaningful engagement beyond prescriptions and purchases by leveraging personalized wellness triggers tied to environmental, behavioral, and community health signals.

Expand Walgreens from reactive care to proactive wellness
Create recurring engagement through personalized experiences
Connect wellness content to loyalty, services, and commerce

My role

Led the strategy, synthesized research, and created the framework.

Seven vertical cards showing local illness trends for Bucktown — COVID-19 at critical, high, and medium levels, and flu up 43%, lice up 51%, cough and cold up 64%, strep up 87%

Designed around context, not campaigns

The experience centered around modular wellness cards designed to surface timely and actionable content based on the user’s context and location.

Community health alerts for flu, cough, and local wellness trends
Environmental alerts tied to UV, pollen, humidity, and air quality
Mindfulness and activity prompts that encouraged healthier habits

My role

Shaped the experience model and worked directly in the UX concepts and flows.

Three phone screens showing a myWalgreens fitness challenge flow: a workout article, a five-day challenge progress view, and a completion screen with a share button

Connected wellness to business value

The UX strategy ensured commerce and care opportunities — including vaccinations, telemedicine, rewards, and product recommendations — felt integrated naturally into the user journey rather than promotional.

My role

Helped align customer value with business opportunity and guided how the experience connected across services.

Four panels: companion sell-through opportunities alongside individual alerts, wireframes linking a UV alert to a skin-protection screen with product bundles, telemedicine, vaccinations and rewards listed, a note that the experience is built on algorithmic triggers, and a grid of eight alert cards for COVID-19, flu, pollen, air quality, a HIIT streak, and lice

What Changed

Sign-ups: 79M
App engagement: +26%
Revenue per member: +4%

HealthCast demonstrated how personalization and behavioral design could help shift Walgreens from a transactional experience toward a broader wellness ecosystem.

What Stayed With Me

The most important lesson was that recurring engagement does not come from adding more features. It comes from making the experience feel timely, relevant, and genuinely useful.

The strongest opportunities emerged when wellness, rewards, services, and commerce were designed as one connected experience rather than separate business goals.