Zocdoc’s mission is to ‘give power to the patient’. To deliver on this, their new brand needed to captured the ethos of the brand and the perspective of the patient.

This required a brand system full of empathy, with the ability to respond to patients’ needs and emotions at every turn. Out would go the cartoon-like doctor characters and a user flow primarily focused on efficient bookings. In its place: a responsive mobile-first experience with the ever-changing patient face at the center.

Our idea was to make Zocdoc literally the friendly face of healthcare. The logo, more than a mark, would become a companion along the journey to a better healthcare experience. A companion that could be responsive, emotional – perhaps even lovable. In this way, Zocdoc’s brand could help patients feel like their journey was understood and reflected in the exam room as well as before and after.

At the center of the new brand lives Zee – a dynamic Z-shaped logo that captures the ever-changing patient face. By responding to user situations in a human way – with a wink, a smile or perhaps a confused look – Zee helps patients feel like their journey is understood and reflected.

In terms of color, we made a radical departure from the cold, omnipresent blues and greens of healthcare, replacing them with an optimistic and warm yellow-led palette.

Together these visual elements assure the patient that, unlike a typical healthcare experience, Zocdoc is fundamentally designed around their needs.

We worked quickly and closely with Zocdoc's UX and UI teams to thoroughly stress-test the system across every touch-point. Insights from this were fed directly into development, ensuring the final brand would be highly usable and useful for the internal design team.

In the weeks immediately following the launch of the new brand look and feel, Zocdoc saw the following results:

- 27.5% increase in Zocdoc app downloads in the two-week period post-rebrand alone

- More than 32 million social impressions overwhelmingly positive in tone within the first week of rebrand launch

- More than 20 original articles published across prominent national outlets (including FastCompany.com, Inc.com, Forbes.com and Entrepreneur.com) within the first week of launch

As a patient-focused brand, Zocdoc needed to better reflect the people that the brand worked so hard to serve. With the scale of growth anticipated by Zocdoc, the logo needed to be something that patients could universally identify with – and even see a bit of themselves in.

It would achieve this not only through its simple and easy user experience, but also by highlighting and celebrating the real-life moments when Zocdoc makes the healthcare experience less challenging.

US healthcare is a complex landscape for patients. And digital health platform Zocdoc has been challenging the conventions of the healthcare industry since launching in 2007.

With a mission to give power to the patient, Zocdoc has helped millions of patients find in-network, neighborhood doctors, instantly book appointments online, complete check-in forms just once and manage wellness appointments. But a legacy design system based on two cartoony doctors and an $80 logo never quite matched this vision.

Zocdoc asked us to create an entirely new brand identity that reflected the company’s mission and served as a powerful outward signal of the role the platform will continue to play for patients as a center of care.