By Lynn Yap | Board Advisor, Life Sciences Week 2025
Trust is the currency of healthcare.
Yet in health tech, trust is often treated like a compliance box to tick, something earned through clinical validation, regulatory approval, or data encryption.
These are essential. But they’re not enough.
As I transition into the health tech sector, one insight comes up repeatedly in conversations with founders, designers, and commercial leads:
Even when a product is clinically sound, trust often breaks down at the point of use.
This breakdown rarely shows up on a dashboard. It is felt in the micro-moments of hesitation, confusion, or emotional fatigue. I call this emotional friction.
And it’s quietly killing adoption.
What Is Emotional Friction?
Emotional friction is the silent resistance that builds when a product isn’t aligned with a user’s emotional state, context, or capacity.
In healthcare, those states are complex.
They include:
- Anxiety: When a patient receives a vague alert from an AI they don’t understand
- Exhaustion: When a caregiver logs into a platform at 2 am and can’t quickly find what they need
- Ambiguity: When a clinician receives a prompt but isn’t sure how reliable or actionable it is
These friction points may seem small, but they accumulate. Over time, they erode trust.
When the System Fails the Experience
Consider Babylon Health’s early chatbot-based triage system. It gained attention for its AI innovation, but users often reported confusion and mistrust, especially when symptom suggestions felt generic, abrupt, or disconnected from their real concern.
The system worked. But many users didn’t feel heard, and that broke the spell.
This is where emotional friction lives: not in the model’s accuracy, but in the relationship between user and interface.
When design doesn’t meet people where they are — emotionally and contextually — even a “working” product feels wrong.
The Limits of “Clinical First” Thinking
Health tech understandably prioritises:
- Clinical safety
- Regulatory approval
- Data performance
But when tools are shaped primarily for protocols or procurement, not people, friction creeps in.
This isn’t unique to healthcare.
In my previous work in consumer and digital industries, we saw similar issues: A product can be functional, even best-in-class, but if it feels alienating, cold, or overwhelming, people drop off.
Being clinically right isn’t the same as being experientially trusted.
Health is deeply personal. So, trust in health tech has to be earned at the human level, not just the technical one.
What We Can Learn from Other Sectors
In beauty, wellness, and consumer tech, teams obsess over how products make people feel.
That’s not indulgent, it’s strategic. Because those industries know:
- Confidence drives conversion
- Clarity drives action
- Reassurance builds loyalty
You don’t need a spa interface for a health app. But you do need:
- Clear onboarding
- Warm, consistent tone
- Interfaces that calm, not confuse
Design isn’t decoration — it’s how people decide whether to trust you.
What Health Tech Can Do Differently
Reducing emotional friction isn’t about adding polish. It’s about aligning your product with the real-world experience of the person using it — whether they’re a patient, a clinician, or a caregiver.
Here are five shifts health tech teams can make:
- Design for emotion, not just function
Ask: “What might the user feel in this moment?” Then design to reduce anxiety or overwhelm, not just complete a task.
- Rehearse the hardest moments
Design teams should test the “edge” scenarios, not just ideal flows. How does the product perform under stress, fatigue, or fear?
- Use language as a signal of safety
Tone and clarity matter. Confusing labels or robotic phrasing create distance, and distance undermines trust.
- Build in micro-reassurance
Just like a good nurse uses tone and touch to build confidence, a good interface can offer feedback, validation, and orientation.
- Cross-pollinate perspectives early
Trust lives at the intersection of product, design, brand, clinical, and commercial. Those teams need to co-create — not work in silos.
The Hidden Cost of Neglect
Here’s what happens when emotional friction goes unaddressed:
- Patients don’t engage
- Clinicians override tools
- Adoption stalls
- Reputation suffers
- And trust, once lost, is hard to win back
Most of these failures won’t be flagged by technical audits. But they will quietly sabotage your commercial strategy and mission.
Because at its core, health tech isn’t just about innovation. It’s about participation.
Designing for Trust Is a Leadership Mindset
This isn’t just a product issue — it’s a leadership issue.
It requires a shift from thinking, from “Is it safe and approved?” To also asking, “Does it feel safe and supportive in the moment it matters most?”
As someone new to health tech but experienced in translating strategy into emotionally resonant growth, I believe trust isn’t a soft metric. It’s a strategic lever that we can’t afford to ignore.
Looking Ahead
These are the themes I’ll be exploring with peers at Life Sciences Week in September, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.
If you’re building, investing in, or scaling health tech tools:
- Where are you seeing emotional friction show up in your products?
- And what’s helped you earn trust, not just once, but consistently over time?
Let’s talk about design, not just function.
Trust, not just safety.
And users, not just usage.
About the Author
Lynn Yap is a Board Advisor to Life Sciences Week 2025 and the author of The Altruistic Capitalist. She advises startups, corporates, and founders on commercial strategy, ethical innovation, and long-term value creation.
Connect on LinkedIn and Email| Explore more at AltruisticCapitalist.com
