Designing from context:
the Ramadan diabetes management course

Where it started

When I was briefed on this project, I knew straight away it was not going to be a standard content build. The learners I was designing for were managing Type 2 diabetes while also observing Ramadan, a month of fasting that changes everything about how someone eats, takes medication, and structures their day. Most existing patient education content had not been built with any of that in mind.

What struck me early on was how many assumptions get baked into health education content without anyone noticing. Assumptions about meal times, about daily routines, about what a normal week looks like. Those assumptions reflect a very specific kind of learner. For Muslim patients managing a long-term condition during Ramadan, they were often completely wrong. That gap between content and context is something I have come across throughout my career, and it is one of the things I care most about getting right.

What made it complex

Three things had to happen at the same time on this project. The content had to be clinically accurate, because this was patient-facing health information on an NHS-integrated platform and errors have real consequences. It had to be culturally accurate, because the course was going out to Arabic, Malaysian, and Singaporean Muslim communities who each have their own practices and contexts. And it had to meet regulatory requirements throughout. None of those things could wait for the others to finish. They had to run in parallel, and each one kept surfacing things that needed revisiting across the other two.

How I approached it

I worked with twenty healthcare professionals across clinical and cultural review cycles before a single module was finalised. The course structure was built around the rhythms of Ramadan rather than a standard daily schedule, which meant rethinking everything from how medication guidance was sequenced to how we talked about meal planning.

The content was not simply translated into three languages. It was culturalised. Those two things are not the same. Translation changes the words. Culturalisation changes the assumptions behind the words, the examples used, the way things are framed, so that someone reading it recognises their own life in it rather than having to mentally translate someone else's experience into their own context.

What came out of it

The course reached 5,000 Muslim patients globally and became the organisation's first fully inclusive multilingual learning programme. The governance model we built for it was later adopted as the standard for all multilingual content across the platform. But what I took from this project most of all was a clearer sense of something I had always believed: starting with who you are designing for, really starting there rather than treating it as a box to tick later, changes everything about the quality of what gets built.