Elliot RylandsFirst design hire. Two portals, a design system, a Series B.
Staff Product Designer at Scan.com, joining as employee twenty and the first design hire. Reported to the founder. Built two interconnected portals (practitioner and patient) and the design system that connected them. Hired and led the design function as it grew from one to four. The work was material to the founders' Series B pitch decks.
The NHS was buckling. Patients on waiting lists for MRIs and CT scans were being pushed into private healthcare they hadn't asked for, navigating a market most of them didn't understand. Scan.com had the supply side of that market coming together. A growing UK clinic network with available capacity. What it didn't have was the product.
Joined as the first design hire and employee twenty. Tidied the existing system before extending it. Built the marketplace supply side first with the practitioner portal in six months, then the patient portal designed to be transparent in a market that often isn't. Hired the second designer, partnered with Ragged Edge on the brand refresh, and produced the work that fed the Series B pitch.
Two interconnected portals shipped. SDS, the Scan Design System, audited and made coherent. Design function grew from one to four. The work was material to the founders' pitch decks, and the round closed.
A market patients hadn't asked to be in
In the UK, NHS waiting lists for MRIs and CT scans had stretched into months. The people arriving at Scan.com usually weren't choosing private healthcare. They'd been pushed into it by a system under pressure.
Scan.com stepped into that gap with a simple proposition: search for a private scan nearby, book quickly, and skip the queue. The supply side of the marketplace already existed. Clinics across the UK had spare capacity. What didn't exist yet was the product.
Bookings happened by email. Diaries were managed manually. There was no messaging layer, no patient portal, no practitioner experience, and no coherent design system underneath any of it.
I joined as the first design hire and employee number twenty, working directly with the founders and a product team about to scale quickly.
How the work came together
Understanding what already existed
The first few weeks weren't spent redesigning screens. They were spent understanding what was already there. Fragments in Figma. Components engineering had already implemented. Naming inconsistencies. Assumptions across product and design about what was reusable and what wasn't. Scan didn't need a clean-slate redesign, it needed structure. The output was SDS, the Scan Design System, tokenised in Figma, structured for engineering consumption, and designed to support two connected healthcare products without slowing delivery down.
Building the supply side first
Marketplaces fail on the supply side first, so the practitioner portal came before the patient experience. The first version shipped in roughly six months. Sole designer, working alongside product and engineering across booking management, diary tooling, messaging, payment tracking, and custom clinic workflows. The goal wasn't to make clinic software feel futuristic. It was to reduce operational drag without interrupting how clinics already worked.
Designing for anxious patients
Most patients arriving at Scan.com were already anxious before they touched the product. They'd spent months inside an overwhelmed healthcare system and were now navigating private healthcare for the first time. The work became less about delight and more about clarity. Transparent pricing before booking. Real appointment availability surfaced early. Fast-turnaround slots presented clearly instead of disguised as upsells. Messaging designed so patients could ask questions without disappearing into another support queue.
Growth changes the work
As the company grew, the role expanded with it. Joe and I hired the second designer together, and I shifted into a leadership-without-the-title role while staying deeply hands-on in the work. Ragged Edge led Scan's rebrand and I was the in-house product design partner who translated the new brand into the actual product experience. A large part of the work also fed directly into the company's Series B raise.
Real systems are usually tidied before they're rebuilt.
Designing through company growth
Joined as employee twenty in August 2023. Left in April 2025 as one of four designers, in a company that had more than tripled in size. The product Scan pitched at Series B was the one those eighteen months built.
From a system underneath, to two portals on top
SDS first, the design system Scan already had, audited and made coherent enough to build on. Then the practitioner portal, the patient portal, and the messaging layer that connected them. A sample of the artefacts at each stage.
The product wasn't there to impress people. It was there to reduce uncertainty.
What changed underneath the interface
By the end of my time at Scan.com, the work had become much bigger than individual screens.
The challenge wasn't just designing flows. It was helping a fast-growing healthcare company create enough structure to keep scaling without the product collapsing under operational complexity.
Design systems. Marketplace logic. Patient trust. Internal tooling. AI-assisted workflows. Production constraints. Engineering collaboration. Organisational growth.
The work became less about polishing interfaces and more about helping the company hold together as it scaled.
Select highlights
The design function I grew from a team of one to a team of four.
Scan grew from twenty people to more than seventy-five during my tenure.
Practitioner and patient portals, both shipped end to end.
Scan Design System, audited, tokenised, and consumed by engineering from their own repo.
In-house partner on the agency-led brand refresh, extending it into the product surface.
The product work became part of the operational story investors were buying into as the company scaled.