Designing Better Experiences for Complex, Human Systems

I’m Andrea N. Mahnke, a UX Design Strategist and mixed-methods researcher specializing in healthcare, digital health, and other complex environments where thoughtful design can make a meaningful difference.

For more than 15 years, I have worked at the intersection of human behavior, technology, and organizational strategy. My experience spans enterprise healthcare systems, electronic health records, patient portals, mobile health applications, telehealth, clinical workflows, informed consent, and safety-enhanced design. Across this work, my role has remained consistent: understand the larger system, uncover what people genuinely need, and translate evidence into experiences that are useful, usable, and sustainable.

From Research to Strategy

I approach design as more than an interface challenge. Every experience exists within a network of people, processes, technologies, policies, and business priorities. Effective solutions emerge when those relationships are understood—not when individual touchpoints are considered in isolation.

My work begins with listening and observation. I use interviews, contextual inquiry, usability testing, surveys, journey mapping, workflow analysis, service blueprints, and participatory workshops to reveal where experiences break down and where opportunities exist. I then help cross-functional teams turn those insights into clear priorities, experience strategies, and actionable design direction.

Over the course of my career, I have partnered with patients, caregivers, clinicians, researchers, engineers, product teams, organizational leaders, and community members. I am especially skilled at bringing these different perspectives together, creating shared understanding, and helping teams make confident decisions amid complexity.

Healthcare Expertise Grounded in Real Experience

My perspective has been shaped by extensive work inside a large integrated health system, where I led and supported research across clinical, patient-facing, and enterprise digital experiences. My projects have included accelerating patient portal and mobile services during the COVID-19 transition, evaluating postoperative wound-monitoring technology, improving medical and dental information workflows, supporting electronic health record usability certification, and developing more understandable approaches to research participation and informed consent.

Frontline experience in hospital emergency department registration further deepened my understanding of healthcare delivery. Working directly with patients, families, and clinical teams reinforced an essential design principle: even small moments of friction can have significant consequences when people are under pressure. Good healthcare design must support accuracy, dignity, trust, and human connection—not simply task completion.

How I Work

I bring curiosity, rigor, empathy, and systems thinking to every engagement. I am comfortable moving between strategic questions and practical details—from framing the right problem and facilitating stakeholder alignment to conducting research and communicating findings in ways that inspire action.

My approach is:

• Human-centered, grounded in the lived experiences of the people a system must serve
• Evidence-led, connecting qualitative insight with quantitative signals and organizational realities
• Collaborative, engaging stakeholders as participants in the design process
• Systems-oriented, looking beyond individual screens to the complete service experience
• Outcome-focused, ensuring that research leads to clearer decisions and meaningful change

What Drives Me

I am drawn to difficult problems—the ones shaped by competing needs, fragmented workflows, legacy systems, and high stakes. These are the challenges where design strategy can provide the greatest value.

I believe research should do more than describe what is happening. It should help people see a problem differently, align around what matters, and identify a credible path forward. My goal is to make complexity understandable and create experiences that work better for the people who use them, the teams who deliver them, and the organizations responsible for sustaining them.

I am currently advancing my doctoral studies in Biomedical and Health Informatics, extending a career dedicated to understanding how people interact with health information and technology.

Ultimately, I design for the moments that matter—when someone is seeking care, making a difficult decision, completing a demanding task, or trying to navigate a system that was not built around their needs.