Cora Saúde
Helping self-employed healthcare professionals manage clients, appointments, and finances — all in one place.
Bridging finance and patient care
Cora is a Brazilian digital bank that provides free business accounts for micro and small entrepreneurs. For my postgraduate degree in UI/UX Design and Digital Products, I chose to tackle a challenge set by Cora: designing a solution to help self-employed healthcare professionals manage their businesses more effectively.
The project followed a full end-to-end UX process — from desk research and user interviews through to ideation, wireframing, and UI design — over the course of several months.
How can we help self-employed healthcare professionals manage clients and appointments in a professional way?
Self-employed healthcare professionals in Brazil face a daily balancing act between delivering patient care and managing the administrative and financial side of their businesses. Most lack dedicated tools — relying on WhatsApp groups, paper notebooks, and spreadsheets to track clients, appointments, and payments. This fragmentation creates friction, lost revenue, and emotional stress around money management.
I lose the courage to charge — it feels like I am going to ruin the relationship with my patient.
Double Diamond approach
A structured end-to-end process moving from broad exploration to focused delivery — diverging to understand the problem space, then converging to build the right solution.
Understanding before designing
Research was the foundation. Before touching any screens, I needed to understand the real behaviours, frustrations, and mental models of self-employed healthcare professionals.
Where Cora stands in the market
Analysing direct and adjacent competitors revealed a clear gap: no single tool combined the financial trust of a digital bank with the scheduling and client management needs of healthcare professionals.
| Feature | Cora | Asaas |
|---|---|---|
| Free PJ Account | Yes | Partial |
| Automated Billing | Yes | Yes |
| Payment Reminders | Partial | Yes |
| Client Database | No | Partial |
| Appointment Scheduling | No | No |
| Mobile UX | Yes | Partial |
What the research revealed
Four patterns emerged consistently across all research methods — each pointing to a different dimension of the same core problem.
Designing for Ana
Synthesised from 8 interviews and survey data, Ana represents the primary user: a self-employed healthcare professional managing her practice solo.
Ana has been practising as a self-employed nutritionist for 4 years. She sees 15–20 patients per week from a shared clinic space. She uses WhatsApp, a paper diary, and a personal spreadsheet to run her entire practice. She loves her work but dreads Monday mornings — spent catching up on payment chasers and updating client records.
- Loses track of who has and hasn't paid each month
- Feels awkward sending payment reminders to patients
- Struggles to find client history across multiple apps
- Wastes time rescheduling via WhatsApp back-and-forth
- No clear view of monthly income vs. expected income
- One place to see all clients and their appointment history
- Automatic payment reminders that feel professional, not cold
- Simple financial dashboard to track monthly earnings
- Easy appointment scheduling without phone calls
- Trust that her financial data is secure and accessible
From insights to features
After mapping jobs-to-be-done and running a prioritisation exercise, four core features emerged as the highest-impact, most viable solutions to Ana's core frustrations.
From flows to screens
User flows and low-fidelity wireframes were validated before moving to high-fidelity design in Figma.
Building a consistent foundation
A component library and token system were established to ensure consistency across all screens and enable scalable design decisions.
What the project produced
Three concrete deliverables came out of this project — each grounded in research and built for a real user need.
What this project taught me
Working through a full UX process from scratch — with real users, real constraints, and a real brief — produced lessons that go beyond the deliverables.