WhatsApp
Simple, Reliable, Private

WhatsApp illustration by Ana Pérez López

Team WhatsApp
Location London, UK & Berlin, Germany
Role Product Designer, 2021–2024

In January 2021, I joined WhatsApp, the world’s largest messaging service, used by over 2 billion people daily. I’ve long admired WhatsApp’s simplicity, both in its functionality and its user interface, which is familiar to the platform it runs on.

As part of the business pillar, I worked on developing features that primarily aid businesses in attracting more customers or effectively managing the influx of conversations. Here are some of the projects I worked on:

Business Discovery

I led the design of a new experience that helps people contact a business through WhatsApp.

This discovery experience empowers users to discover businesses near them, browse various business categories, and search for specific businesses. It includes large brands such as McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and Telekom, as well as local businesses like electricians, cleaners, and local coffee shops.

Business Search

After multiple iterations of the Business Discovery experience, my team focused on Business Search as the primary means of contacting businesses on WhatsApp. I had the privilege of co-leading this transition before moving on to the Labels and Lists projects.

Business Search enables anyone on WhatsApp to initiate a search and type in the name or a specific type of business they wish to reach out to. Verified businesses, nearby businesses, and those with comprehensive profiles are prioritized in the search results. For instance, you can refer to the profile completion project below to see some of the work we’ve done in this area.

Complete Your Profile

I led the design of an experience to help businesses easily improve their profile information. On WhatsApp, few businesses see the benefit of having a complete profile. But with business search and more ways for people to find and contact businesses, having a complete profile is the most important way to build trust with their customers.

This experience aimed at helping businesses enter some basic key information about their business. This design also made improvements to how location is entered, as well as a more complete onboarding experience that was worked on as a part of the business app registration. Read more about the Business App Registration on the next project.

At WhatsApp, I learned that executing with excellence is critical, even if it means delaying launches or pursuing more challenging solutions. Quality craftsmanship is crucial—not just for polish, but for reducing frustration and building trust in the product.

This focus on execution excellence often requires tough trade offs, such as a delays and technical complexities. But it’s the key for achieving higher impact.

Google Care Studio
Unified Healthcare Data

Team Google Health
Location London, UK
Role Senior UX Designer, 2019–2021

My team at DeepMind became part of the newly created Health product area at Google in late 2019 to unify efforts across the company and expand into the US market.

The Care Studio is a project still in development, with a limited amount of information that can be shared. Watch the video above for an overview of the offering. Continue reading for some of the efforts I worked on.

Google Care Studio Mobile App

The Care Studio mobile app adopts many features from Streams, leveraging the powerful technology developed for Google Health, which offers unified searchable health records.

The project to migrate the Streams interface to use Material Design and Flutter was a stepping stone towards this integration. I worked closely with Dem Gerolemou and Devon Wang on the design language for Google Care Studio. This time, we had the opportunity to refresh our data visualization system, update iconography, and direct a new illustration style.

Vital Signs tab for Google Care Studio, by Nuno Coelho Santos

Data Visualization

I defined the standards for displaying health data in various types of data visualizations, adhering to Google’s data visualization principles.

The goal was to ensure that the data presentation is clinically safe, saves time by being easy to read at a glance, facilitates understanding of values out of range, and makes predicted values easy to comprehend. Added support for gestures and haptics helps clinicians observe changes between two values or values from past data.

Material Symbols

As part of the upcoming Material Design 3 update, Google ventured into creating symbols for their icon language that respond to different sizes and weights while still feeling part of the Google identity.

I worked closely with Devon Wang to run simultaneous workshops in the US and the UK to represent different types of health objects, locations, tests, organs, etc., with clinicians, nurses, and other clinical professionals, and create Google's set of icons specific for healthcare that are recognizable around the globe.

COVID-19 Dashboards by Google Health for the NHS, by Nuno Coelho Santos

COVID-19 Hospital Dashboards

During the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, I was part of a small group of designers, engineers and clicians from Google stationed at the Department of Health London helping them set up hospital dashboards tracking available beds, supplies, and test reports. These were presented in TVs across different hospitals in London.

Google recognized my efforts with an award later that year. Thank you, Google, for the opportunity to do the most meaningful work of my life.

In the mix of two teams joining forces with Google Health, I learned a lot about collaboration and co-creation. Bringing together past experiences and ideas to shape something new makes everyone feel included. We can learn from the past but also push ahead with new ideas. It's not just about making products, but also about building strong connections that lead us forward.

Streams
Faster, Better Patient Care

Streams project cover image for Google DeepMind, by Nuno Coelho Santos

Team Google DeepMind
Location London, UK
Role Visual Designer & Senior UX Designer, 2017–2020

I joined Streams in early 2017, shortly after its initial launch led by a small team of brilliant in-house and freelance designers.

Here are some of the projects I worked on:

Photo of a nurse holidng an iPhone running the Streams app, shoing a Covid Test Result

COVID-19 Test Results

In June 2020, we released what would be the last feature in Streams before focusing entirely on Google Care Studio: Displaying COVID-19 patient test results. This feature was critical to help care team protect themselves and their patients during the onset of the pandemic.

I'm incredibly proud of all the work I’ve done as part of the Streams team and for the NHS while working at Google.

Color Usage Guidelines for Streams, by Nuno Coelho Santos

Design System

As part of the redesign of Streams, we embarked on the simplification and standardization of the user interface, with an opinionated focus about how to bring clinical safety to the interface.

The system expands upon Material Design and adds three key patterns: color usage guidelines to reserve hot colors exclusively for conveying patient danger, healthcare-specific user interface components such as National Early Warning Score (NEWS) Badges, and careful documentation of how different types of data should be formatted.

A lot of this formalization was key to our CE-Marking process as a way to prove clinical safety in our product, as well as adherance to the NHS Digital design patterns.

Material Redesign

I led the redesign of Streams to adopt Material design. I worked closely with Alessandro Suraci and Duncan Fleming to set up a system that merges established design patterns and unique features of our product, both in design and code.

Accessibility was a key focus, with content aligned along two keylines to improve legibility and minimize eye movement during scanning. Grouping content with leading icons or badges enhanced organization. The two-keyline layout also facilitated support for resizable text sizes. Additionally, we revamped all UI copy to ensure conciseness and maintain a consistent tone of voice.

My time working in healthcare has been the most fulfilling so far. Working in healthcare also requires constant learning and growth. One of the things I've learned is how important it is to have in-house specialists when working on products so industry-specific. In our team, the clinicians helped us understand workflows, conduct hazard assessments, and gather feedback from patients and other clinicians.

Hi, I’m Nuno, a product designer and app developer based in Tokyo.

Past Work: