Smart Note - Mayo Clinic

Three questions to the project team

What was the particular challenge of the project from a UX point of view?
One of the toughest UX challenges in the Smart Note project was designing trust into an invisible system. Clinicians are skeptical of automation, especially in high-stakes conversations. I had to create an interface that felt seamless and supportive, not disruptive. That meant showing just enough of what the AI was doing in the background, keeping users in control, and ensuring Smart Note fit naturally into fast-paced clinical workflows. It wasn’t just about reducing clicks, it was about restoring focus to the patient.

What was your personal highlight in the development process? Was there an aha!-moment, was there a low point?
A big challenge and later, a breakthrough was dealing with ambiguity in the product definition itself. At the start, 'Smart Note' meant different things to different stakeholders: Was it a dictation tool? A real-time scribe? A note-summarizing assistant?

That lack of clarity made early design decisions feel like shots in the dark. But the aha! The moment came when we stopped trying to define every detail upfront and instead co-created the product direction through rapid prototyping and live clinician feedback.

Embracing that ambiguity gave us room to explore, fail fast, and ultimately land on a solution that was both technically feasible and truly valuable in the clinical setting.

Where do you see yourself and the project in the next five years?
Working on Smart Note made it clear, I want to keep building high-impact products at the intersection of AI and healthcare. In five years, I see myself leading design for tools that not only solve real problems but reshape how care is delivered.

As for Smart Note, it was ahead of its time. Now, with startups racing to solve clinical documentation with AI, the space is heating up, but few have the clinical trust, research grounding, or user empathy we built at Mayo. I’d love to see Smart Note evolve into a gold standard, quietly running in the background, improving outcomes without adding friction. And I hope to keep designing products that do exactly that: disappear, but make a real difference.