Designing the Mobile UX for Real-Time Glucose Monitoring

My experience with metabolic health at Zero Fasting, specifically the impact of glucose tracking, brought me to Levels Health. Joining as Lead Designer in a 50-person team, my focus was on improving and scaling our core mobile UX and evolving the Levels brand.

The biggest design challenge has been reducing user friction across the entire experience. In the U.S., acquiring a CGM requires either a doctor's prescription or enrollment in our research study. On top of that, there are issues like high costs, shipping hurdles, faulty devices, and slim hardware margins. Explaining the distinction between Levels membership and CGM ordering adds another layer of complexity. Plus, you have to sign up and connect the CGM to the hardware manufacturer's app before connecting to Levels — more friction. To counter this, we needed both trust and a trigger to convert potential customers to members.

At Levels, I truly learned the meaning of agile software development at a rapid pace. Test, learn, iterate. A low-ego environment where anyone can assume any role that's needed, as experimentation is the company's DNA. The focus is not shipping to see what happens, but to see if a hypothesis can be confirmed or disproven, and why. Documentation and transparency are key, memos over meetings, and asynchronous preferred — all while building in public. In this setting, various approaches to design and development have been explored — be it product-led, design-led, or engineering-led. Engineers have been designing in Figma, and designers have pushed commits.

Continuous glucose monitoring is on its way to becoming a key tool for people to manage their health, yet it remains too expensive for mainstream adoption. Working with CGM hardware suppliers challenges us to control margins and keep prices low. Initially, the design team consisted of myself and a Design Director. Later, I led the design function independently. My role has been more entrepreneurial at Levels — doing what's needed, where it's needed, to find product-market fit. Unlike my previous jobs with focus on mobile product ecosystems, this role required a broader approach. Levels is a $300 million business on a mission to find a profitable way to sell CGMs.