Dokita began during the COVID-19 pandemic, when access to both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 healthcare in Nigeria became a serious problem. Many people were already relying on advice from shop chemists and pharmacies rather than professional consultations, and the pandemic made in-person visits riskier and access even harder — booking a lab test or a consultation often meant physically visiting a hospital just to book a date and pay.

The goal was to make basic healthcare — booking consultations, running lab tests, buying prescribed drugs — accessible from a phone, for a user base spanning a wide range of ages and digital literacy.

Research used non-directed in-depth interviews so each participant could speak freely about their experiences and goals at the hospital. Over 10 people were interviewed at a hospital — three who had booked lab tests and described long waits and having to visit in person just to book and pay, seven seeking consultations (two referred by other doctors) who had to visit weeks in advance to book and pay, and several regular patients. Three more people were interviewed outside the hospital setting to understand how they approached healthcare access during that period.

A recurring insight outside the hospital was reliance on non-professional advice from pharmacies and chemists, driven by how stressful and risky hospital visits felt. That finding shaped onboarding and several feature decisions. The interview insights were distilled into a user persona that guided the rest of the design work.

Feature ideation was a collaborative brainstorm with the project manager, weighing user insights, the existing healthcare system, technical feasibility, and business goals. It produced the feature set that shaped the app: seamless appointment booking, scheduled telehealth consultations (calling itself was out of scope due to hospital privacy constraints, so users could schedule but not call in-app), integrated payments, appointment tracking and reminders, an e-pharmacy with delivery, educational health content, and a guided onboarding flow.

Visual direction came from a moodboard built around a minimal aesthetic — blue and white to signal trust and reliability, used to highlight buttons and calls to action, paired with clear, legible type. Given time constraints, the process moved quickly into high-fidelity screens rather than lingering in low-fidelity wireframes, to keep a clearer view of the product and leave more time for interactive prototyping and usability testing.

Login and sign-up needed to collect a fair amount of user data while staying usable for an audience as old as 60, so fields were grouped and categorized to reduce friction, paired with real-time validation, larger text and higher contrast for legibility, and contextual help for anyone unsure what a field was asking for.

The home screen was built around a small number of clear, illustrated call-to-action cards — Talk to a Doctor, Schedule Consultation, Schedule House Call, Pharmacy — rather than an icon-only nav, so the primary tasks stayed obvious at a glance instead of hidden behind vague icons.

Secondary features — calendar, health tips, notifications, settings — live in the bottom navigation instead of competing for space on the home screen, keeping the first screen focused on the handful of things most users came to do.

One of the project's major goals was easy access to consultations and lab tests without stacks of forms, so the booking flow leaned minimalist: pick a date and time, see what's expected of you (like pre-test requirements for a lab test), and confirm — built to be usable by a wide range of users without hand-holding.

E-pharmacy adoption in the African market was, at the time, held back by the checkout experience itself — research into existing apps in this space surfaced convoluted flows, unclear shipping information, and limited payment options as the recurring complaints.

The checkout here was simplified into a straight line: browse, cart, shipping address, payment. Delivery estimates were made transparent up front, and payment supported multiple trusted methods, including mobile money and digital wallets, so users could pay however they already trusted.

A calendar let users track appointments and set their own events — a pill reminder or a daily water-intake goal — extending the app slightly beyond pure appointment-booking into everyday health habits. Health tips gave users a reliable place to read about self-care instead of relying on unverified sources.

Most core flows in the product — booking a consultation, a lab test, or a pharmacy order — were designed to complete in under five steps, in plain language, replacing processes that previously took hours and a physical hospital visit.

The biggest takeaway was that most health-tech products in this space over-complicate the experience in the name of features, when the harder and more valuable problem is building an interface a first-time user can understand within a few taps — UI polish matters less than an intuitive flow that works for someone with low digital literacy on their first try.