TL;DR
Date & Role
June 23-Nov 24 • Founding Product Designer
The problem
Foot care in America is broken. Clinicians spend most of their day buried in paperwork, leading to burnout. Patients wait weeks or even months for appointments while their conditions worsen.
What was one big challenge
Transforming a heavily regulated, paperwork-heavy clinical process into a digital workflow that clinicians could trust. The system needed to be scalable, compliant with Medicare, and intuitive for both seasoned medical professionals and new staff.
Sahib's Contribution
Designed and shipped AI-powered clinical tools and Medicare compliance systems from zero to scale, leading UX strategy, prototyping, and clinician research across all users
Goal
The goal was straightforward: unlock clinician productivity by introducing artificial intelligence into their daily workflow in a trustworthy and secure way.
Impact
Hike generated over $XX million in revenue during my time there and was on its path to a series A. I got to make investor decks and pitch decks but more than anything else we were able to impact more than 30,000 people who are able to walk pain free everyday. Our team did this in under 16 months making it even more special.
*Feet can be… well, pretty weird to look at especially on the internet so for both of our sakes, I’m using a 3D animated one instead. Let’s just pretend this makes it less cursed.*
Previously, clinicians relied on paper forms, resulting in frequent patient information loss. Bringing this online would solve core user needs: eliminating paperwork, reducing errors, and enabling faster patient screenings and access to healthcare. In early 2024, we launched a clinical platform centered around 3 design principles of simplicity, fluidity and delight.
Instill Simplicity
Many healthcare tools often overwhelm users by showing everything upfront charts, inputs, settings all at once. It’s too much, especially when you’re just trying to care for someone.
We wanted to take a different approach with Hike. The essentials were always within reach, but the rest unfolded gradually, only when it was needed.
This allowed us to support both first-time users and experienced clinicians without compromise. It was especially important in complex flows like patient orders, where small decisions could branch into very different outcomes. Our goal was to keep things calm and focused, never overwhelming.
Bring Fluidity
We leaned into fluidity after noticing how rigid transitions break the user’s rhythm. Static screens made the app feel inert, like nothing was alive or cared for.
Motion wasn’t unnecessary. It was about creating a continuous, intuitive journey. Each interaction flowed into the next, helping users stay grounded while moving forward. It was less about animation, more about presence.
A little more delight
Delight at Hike wasn’t just about adding polish, it was about care. We wanted the product to feel warm, human, and a little unexpected in the best way. Small moments of joy helped offset the weight of clinical tasks and made the experience feel less like software, more like support.
Delight looks different to everyone. What mattered most was the intent: to build with empathy and leave thoughtful touches wherever they’d be felt most.
Dynamic tray system
My pursuit of simplicity through multiple iterations led to the dynamic tray system. These trays house components that expand, contract, and adapt fluidly to the user’s actions appearing just when they’re needed.
Trays are modular components that expand, collapse, or surface on the fly, always triggered by user intent. They act like focused, self-contained windows into the app, each with a clear purpose and limited scope. Each tray acts like a compact version of the app, purpose-built with focused capabilities and clear boundaries.
To make transitions feel intuitive, each new tray is slightly different in size than the one before it. This subtle size shift signals progression and helps users understand they’ve moved to a new step in the process.
Each tray includes a title and icon to anchor the experience. Users can dismiss the tray or step back when needed. Whether it’s surfacing an explainer, a checklist, or a form, trays adapt to context and theme, keeping the experience calm, cohesive, and intentional.
We enabled direct access to diabetic shoes for Medicare and Medicaid patients.
Shoes were a big part of holistic care and also a huge cost saver. Clinicians were spending countless hours every week tracking shoe orders for their patients so I made it easy for Medicare and Medicaid patients to get the custom diabetic shoes and insoles they needed Everything from ordering to returns was brought online, helping more people access preventive care through medically necessary footwear.
Forms, dynamic trays and shoes were a good first step, eliminating the need for paper-based processes. But to truly unlock clinicians and free them to focus on their patients, we needed intelligent workflows. I shadowed over 10 hours of in-clinic visits to design workflows where AI could meaningfully take over. As part of this, I was able to work deeply with engineering and AIML research team to introduce vision models capable of detecting common pathologies like bunions, skin issues, and calluses.
Our vision models detected early signs of foot diseases unlocking care for more Americans than ever before.
Patients and clinicians could now record a video, in most cases less than 30 seconds of their feet, and Hike AI would flag any visible pathologies or early indicators. Since majority of clinicians were iphone users I levereaged dynamic island to show insights and live status of the patients scan that they were recording. We were able to provide almost real time updates to the clinicains.
For patients It’s hard to describe what’s wrong with their feet.
To increase our reach and test our models in real-world settings, I pushed for a simple idea: give every patient a personal link they could use at home. The goal was to let them capture concerns the moment they noticed them. Whether it was a strange rash, a cracked nail, or peeling skin, they could upload an image and instantly see visually similar results to help make sense of what they were seeing.
Clinicians as trusted teachers
At the time, the team was facing a data shortage, and training models for accuracy across multiple pathologies had become a major bottleneck. I worked closely with them to design and introduce a data validation pipeline. All detected pathologies were auto-saved to patient notes. Wherever clinical validation was required, a clinician was prompted to review and confirm the findings.
As the product matured, building a robust design system became essential to ship updates quickly for both clinicians and patients. I collaborated with the engineering team to design a flexible and scalable system that ensured consistency across the entire Hike ecosystem, from mobile to tablet to desktop. This involved using the Mantine UI library since our engineers were familiar with it and refactoring many different UI components to fit our needs. It also meant that at some point, we would become bottlenecked by the design system’s architecture in Figma which was an acceptable tradeoff at that time.
Practicing Clinician