Three ways storytelling can elevate your digital health product

A great product alone is not enough for success. You need a story. Storytelling is a powerful way to get people to engage with your product and humanise the digital healthcare experience. Yet we’ve noticed that creating a compelling narrative is something founders and clinicians often overlook.

Storytelling can:

• Create emotional connection with your product and brand
• Help users and patients make more informed decisions
• Build your identity, authenticity and trust

This guide will give you multiple practical tips on the art of storytelling, where it’s needed, and why it matters – the improved outcomes for your product or website.

1. Create empathy and emotional connection

How? Write a narrative that’s about feelings more than functions, using simple, relatable language, with a tagline and description that reflects the positive state users want to get to. User interviews and testing are crucial for this. Share patients’ stories of similar health challenges, fears and hopes, and how your product helped them.

Where? Everywhere! In the onboarding process. Messaging, content, navigation and microcopy. Emotionally challenging points, such as a diagnosis or hard decision.

Why? Healthcare is deeply personal and can be emotional, and seeing other people’s stories can help us feel understood. They create empathy and emotional resonance, so users feel more warmth towards your product and are more likely to engage.

2. Help users and patients make more informed decisions

How? Make educational content human and relatable. Simplify medical information, explain terminology and use natural language. Don’t assume how much people do or don’t know. Consider a navigational aid such as a graphic device or character that users can click for more explanation, which always appears in the same place and becomes familiar.

Where? Care information, medical concepts and terminology, and treatment information.

Why? Healthcare advice, information and data can be overwhelming. Storytelling makes complexities easier to understand and relate to, so that users can understand what they need to do, and make informed decisions about their wellbeing or treatment.

3. Build your identity, authenticity and trust

How? Show your expertise and experience and your ‘why’. Share your journey: how you identified a healthcare challenge and solution, the challenges you’ve faced (with your own health journey and/or creating the product), who has helped you, your motivation and your mission to improve health outcomes.

Where? The about us section. During onboarding and initial user interactions. In marketing and social media. Every time you talk about the product, even if telling your own story doesn’t come naturally.

Why? Storytelling makes you and your brand human and relatable. It shows why you’re credible, creates trust and helps people feel connected to you. People relate to people. This is how you’ll stand out among hundreds of thousands of digital health products and how people will buy into you.