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Centralise post-treatment support for breast cancer survivors

Product Designer

Every year nearly 55,000 people are diagnosed with breast cancer in the UK, and there are an estimated 700,000 living with a diagnosis.

While treatment ends at point of discharge, survivors often struggle with physical, emotional, and social challenges, and reliable post-treatment support is scarce. Breast Cancer Now and CAST wanted to explore a low-cost, high-impact digital solution to help survivors navigate life after treatment.

I led design from research through to launch, conducting workshops with volunteers, mapping content and flows, and iterating on scrappy prototypes. Beyond this, I built out the initial design system for the application, and helped steer feedback mechanisms to guide future improvements.

Initial research revealed two key themes:

• After hospital discharge, survivors were left alone to adjust to their ‘new normal’, often feeling unsupported;
• The BCN forums were chock full of great information and suggestions, but they were fragmented and overwhelming. Users needed a central, trustworthy, easy-to-navigate platform offering practical advice and emotional support in digestible ways.

This highlighted an opportunity to create a simple digital companion that helped survivors manage recovery with clarity and confidence.

We built BECCA-lite, a web app to test delivering daily curated suggestions for wellbeing, nutrition, emotional care, and lifestyle adjustments. Features included:

• Five tips surfaced per day, with the ability to explore by theme;
• ‘Favourites’ to save and build a personal collection;
• The ability to share a link to a version of the recommendation on the BCN website

BECCA-lite quickly gained traction: over 1,000 users joined the closed beta within days, providing invaluable feedback about the mechanisms of the app, the types of content they wanted, and how to connect it back to the community. We experimented with imagery and tone of voice, sticking to the BCN principle of creating a sense of empowerment without being patronising.

Fast improvements and proof of concept led to expansion into native iOS and Android apps, shipping BCN's first digital system beyond their print guidelines. Understanding our average user’s age would be above 55 and in a potentially fragile state of mind, a simple yet rich product with only 5 different types of input was designed.

Within a few months BECCA already had 3,600 live users and soon after was a runner up in the BMA awards. Skip ahead a few months and BECCA had over 7,500 users, winning Best Health Project at National Lottery Awards and with Big Lottery Fund awarding Breast Cancer Now £655,000 to further develop the app. Initial launch saw 1,000 new users downloading and interacting with BECCA every month:

Personally, this was a bittersweet project to work on. While it was amazing to be creating something for an audience who were incredibly invested and deserving, it was hard working on something vital that hadn’t already been tackled properly, digital or not.

Any ‘wins’, like usage data, activation rates etc, had to be taken with a lot reverence than on any other product I’ve worked on – these were people who'd faced hugely traumatic events but were now left to fend for themselves through an endless lack of funding.

BECCA has now supported more than 42,000 people.