What FOLX taught me about designing trust into healthcare apps

Most apps ask for an email and a password. A healthcare app asks who you are, what's going on with your body, and how you'll pay for it, usually in the first 5 minutes.

In healthcare, trust is the most important thing you design for. Lose it and people don't just leave your app. Some of them put off care altogether.

At FOLX Health, that was even more true. FOLX serves the LGBTQIA+ community, and a lot of people arrived carrying bad experiences with healthcare. For many members, FOLX was the first place they saw trans healthcare talked about openly. Real trans people were in the branding and messaging, sharing their own healthcare experiences. And the clinicians understood trans patients and had the data to back it up.

Here are the 4 ways I've seen healthcare products lose trust, and what to do instead.

1. Being vague about where people's data goes

This is the big one. If people can't tell where their information is going and how you'll use it, they assume the worst.

Say it plainly, right where you ask for it. Who will see this: the care team, a pharmacy, an insurer? What it's used for, and what it's never used for. A privacy policy linked in the footer doesn't count. The answer has to sit next to the question.

At FOLX, anytime we asked for something sensitive, like a Social Security number or current medications, we said why we needed it and where it would be stored.

2. Not preparing people for what you'll need

Nobody likes finding out on step 6 that they need their insurance card. Tell people upfront what they'll need, roughly how long it takes, and why you're asking for each thing.

A personal question with no context feels like a form. The same question with 1 line explaining why it matters feels like care. Before asking about hormone history, we explained that it helps our clinicians recommend the right dose. Start with what's easy, and save the sensitive questions for when people know why they're there.

3. Making people fit your form

A lot of healthcare platforms make people squeeze into options that weren't built for them. A legal name with nowhere to put the name they use. 2 checkboxes for gender. Clinical words nobody uses for themselves.

Give people room to be themselves inside the portal: the name they go by, their pronouns, options that reflect real people, and language that sounds human.

Legal name is a good example. At FOLX, we told people when we'd need their legal name, why we might need it, and which version we meant. The name on your insurance card might not match your driver's license, so we asked for the one that actually mattered. Everywhere else, people saw the name they go by. When people see themselves in the product, they believe it was built for them.

4. Making people feel trapped

A long flow with no way out and no one to ask is where nervous people drop off. They should always know how to step back, save their progress and come back later, or reach a real person they can talk to.

At FOLX, messaging the care team was always available in the member portal. The support center had plenty of FAQs, how-to videos, and links to clinician-written articles. In healthcare, knowing someone's there matters as much as getting the answer.

What it added up to

Those principles, plus a design system that kept the site, app, and emails consistent, showed up in the numbers: 3x site traffic, 40% faster design-to-dev handoff, and 18% less drop-off in sign-up. The full story is in the FOLX case study.

None of this is unique to FOLX. Any healthcare or fintech product that asks for personal information is asking people to trust it first, and every screen either backs that up or doesn't. If that's where your product is, take a look at our healthcare work.