In-Office Kits
Lab collection moved into the clinic — kits, activation flows, and a sticker. Labs series, part 3.
- Role
- Product Designer — Labs (kits design lead)
- Timeline
- August 2024 – January 2026
- Team
- 1 Product designer, kits design lead (me) · 1 Staff product designer (Labs design lead) · 1 Content designer · 1 Product manager · Labs engineering and operations
- Scope
- Wholesale kit ordering · Activation flows · Kit packaging (physical) · In-office draws research program · Practitioner web
My role
- Led discovery for in-office kits, running the sessions that framed the practitioner ordering and stocking workflow.
- Designed the wholesale browsing, ordering, and reordering experience, including the 20-unit cart cap and its error states.
- Designed 3 activation flows — direct link, patient profile, and catalog — so kits work however a practitioner arrives.
- Designed the kit sticker, the physical brand touchpoint on every box that ships to a clinic.
- Owned the in-office draws research program: practitioner interview guide, jobs-to-be-done synthesis, comparative lab analysis, and the discovery workshop.
- Ran Loom walkthroughs to align the Labs team asynchronously before handoff.
TL;DR
In short
Problem
Practitioners who draw blood in their own clinic had to source collection supplies from third parties, track inventory by hand, and coordinate specimen logistics outside the platform their labs already ran on.
Approach
Ran discovery first, then designed wholesale ordering around how clinics actually stock — familiar commerce patterns, hard operational limits turned into helpful guardrails, and a physical artifact treated as part of the product.
Outcome
The pilot’s top kit logged 524 orders in its first months; kits reached general availability in January 2026 and the research program seeded the in-office phlebotomy work that continues today.
Context and problem
The situation we walked into
Business context
Labs launched with mobile phlebotomy and lab visits — both of which route the patient away from the clinic. A large segment of integrative practitioners already draw blood in-office and needed supplies, not services. Kits extended Labs into that segment: wholesale collection supplies, ordered and restocked inside the platform, with Fullscript’s logistics behind them.
User context
Clinic operators think in inventory, not orders: what’s on the shelf, what runs out mid-day, what to reorder before it does. They already know how to draw blood — the product’s job was a trustworthy supplier with an ordering flow that respects how clinics stock, not clinical education.
Constraints and complexity
Supply-chain realities imposed a 20-unit cart cap that design had to make feel like guidance rather than a wall. Practitioners could arrive from 3 different contexts, each needing its own activation path. And part of the deliverable was physical: the kit box and its sticker are the product’s most visible surface inside a clinic.
Goals and success metrics
What success looked like
A practitioner can stock their office from Fullscript without contacting support — browse, order, restock — and the kit that arrives feels like part of the platform, not a third-party shipment.
Success criteria
- Kits ship as a pilot in 2025 with wholesale ordering live end to end.
- All 3 activation paths reach production.
- Practitioners reorder without support intervention.
- The program graduates from pilot to general availability.
Approach
How we got there
- 01
Ran discovery before design
Booked discovery sessions with the Labs team the week the kits work opened, mapping how practitioners source, stock, and run out of supplies. The sessions reframed the product from “a store for kits” to “a restocking workflow” — clinics buy on rhythm, not impulse, and the design followed that rhythm.
- 02
Designed wholesale ordering on familiar patterns
Built browsing, cart, and reorder flows on commerce patterns practitioners already know — catalog, product detail, cart — rather than inventing a medical-supply paradigm. Reordering from order history became the primary loop, because a clinic’s second order is the one that predicts retention.
- 03
Turned the 20-unit cap into a guardrail
Supply constraints capped carts at 20 units per kit. Instead of a generic error at checkout, the limit surfaces early, in context, with specific copy about what to do — turning the highest-frustration moment in bulk ordering into an expectation set upfront.
- 04
Treated the physical kit as a design surface
Designed the sticker that ships on every kit box — the one Fullscript touchpoint sitting on a clinic shelf between orders. A small artifact, argued for deliberately: the box is the brand’s only physical presence in the practitioner’s space.
- 05
Extended into the draws research program
Owned the research that carried kits’ momentum into in-office draws: a practitioner interview guide, jobs-to-be-done synthesis, a comparative analysis of lab providers’ in-office programs, and the discovery workshop that shaped the roadmap. The program continued past my involvement — the design work seeded it.
Key decisions
Forks in the road
Commerce patterns vs a clinical supply portal
Some practitioners expected something resembling a medical-supply portal — dense tables, catalog numbers, quote requests. Familiar e-commerce patterns (browse, card, cart) were the other path: less “clinical,” but zero learning curve for users who already shop online.
- Decision
- Built the catalog on commerce patterns practitioners already know, styled to the Labs design language.
- Tradeoff
- Traded supply-portal signaling for immediate usability — the right call for a product whose success metric is unassisted reorders.
Surface the cart cap early vs enforce it at checkout
The 20-unit cap was non-negotiable operationally. Enforcing it at checkout is the standard implementation, but it converts a supply-chain constraint into a last-second rejection — the worst moment to surprise someone stocking a clinic for the month.
- Decision
- Exposed the limit in context while ordering, with specific copy about the cap and what to do about larger needs.
- Tradeoff
- More states and copy to design and build, in exchange for a constraint that reads as guidance instead of failure.
3 activation paths vs one onboarding flow
Practitioners arrive at kits from meaningfully different contexts: a direct link from the team, a patient’s profile, or the catalog. One unified onboarding is cheaper to build, but every entry point would carry the wrong assumptions for 2 of the 3 audiences.
- Decision
- Designed a distinct activation path per entry point — direct link, patient profile, and catalog.
- Tradeoff
- 3× the activation surface to design and maintain, in exchange for each practitioner landing in a flow that matches their intent.
Research the draws program before designing it
In-office draws could have started from a brief — the demand signal was already loud. But the workflow crosses practitioner, patient, and courier, and a brief written before research would have encoded guesses about the messiest parts.
- Decision
- Built the research program first: interviews, jobs-to-be-done, comparative analysis, then a discovery workshop to shape the roadmap.
- Tradeoff
- Design started weeks later than it could have — and inherited a scope grounded in observed workflow instead of assumption.
Solution
What we shipped
Outcomes and impact
What it moved
Top kit, pilot
524 orders
The Comprehensive Metabolic Panel led the pilot’s first months, with CBC (439) and Estradiol (396) behind it.
General availability
January 2026
Kits graduated from a year of piloting to GA.
Program seeded
Ongoing
The kits work and draws research seeded the in-office phlebotomy program that continues today.
Business impact
Kits opened Labs to the segment the original phlebotomy model skipped: clinics that already draw blood and needed supplies inside the platform. By early 2026 the program had graduated to general availability, and in-office collection had become one of the most-requested capabilities across the labs product — demand the draws research program was built to meet.
User impact
Practitioners stock their clinic from the same platform that runs their labs — browse, order, restock — without support tickets or third-party suppliers. The activation paths land each practitioner in a flow matching how they arrived, and the kit on the shelf carries the platform’s design language into the clinic itself.
Learnings and reflections
What I’d take with me
Unglamorous surfaces decide retention
Reorder flows, quantity caps, and activation paths never make a highlight reel, but the clinic that restocks without friction is the one that stays. The second order — not the first — turned out to be the design target that mattered.
A sticker is an interface
The kit box sits on a clinic shelf for weeks — the platform’s only physical presence in the practitioner’s space. Treating the sticker as a design surface, argued for like any feature, bought brand trust no screen could.
Research momentum outlives the researcher
The draws program kept moving after my part ended because the research artifacts — interview guide, jobs-to-be-done, workshop outputs — were built to be picked up by others. Research that only lives in the researcher’s head isn’t a program; it’s a bottleneck.