How Simple Healthcare thinks and speaks
The brand, principles, voice, and writing guidelines behind every Simple product. A working draft ahead of the branding pass.
Working draft
Brand drives every decision made when building new products or features. It is the values that define our identity and what makes us stand out.
Vision
Why we exist, what our values are, and how they guide the future of the product.
Why we exist
Federal transparency rules made healthcare prices public, but the raw files are unusable. Simple Healthcare is an independent price and access platform that turns published prices into something an employer, an advisor, or a patient can use.
Values
Independent
No insurer or health system owns us. Our only obligation is to the people reading the numbers.
No conflicts of interest
We do not take commissions or pay for referrals. A price is shown because the data says so, not because someone paid for placement.
Peer-reviewable
Our methodology across integrated datasets is documented and open to scrutiny. A research team owns methodology, peer review, and data oversight.
Persistent
We started asking for this data in 2012, a decade before federal rules required it. We are here because the data finally showed up, not because a regulation created a market.
Who we serve
| Audience | Product | What they need from us |
|---|---|---|
| Plan sponsors | Roadmap | Strategy and benchmarking for the health plans they fund. |
| Licensed advisors | Roadmap | Evidence to bring to clients without a sales agenda behind it. |
| Analysts | Landscape | A data workspace for working directly with the underlying files. |
| Patients | Search | A straight answer about what care will cost before they commit to it. |
Design principles
The considerations that guide our practice. They outline how we approach design philosophically and help with everyday decisions.
- 1
Clarity over cleverness
Healthcare pricing is confusing enough. Every screen should make one thing easier to understand than it was before. If a design choice adds delight but subtracts clarity, cut it.
- 2
Show the work
Trust is earned by exposing sources, methods, and caveats, not by hiding them. Where a number comes from is part of the number.
- 3
Accurate before beautiful
Never let a visual simplify a figure into something misleading. Estimates look like estimates, medians are labeled as medians, and missing data is shown as missing rather than smoothed over.
- 4
Independent by design
No dark patterns, no steering, no sponsored placement. The interface never nudges a reader toward an outcome that benefits anyone but them.
- 5
Respect the reader’s time
Our readers are HR directors between meetings, advisors preparing for a client, and patients in a stressful moment. Lead with the answer, then offer the detail.
Tone of voice
How we speak to our audience at every moment of their journey. Proposed from the company values, not from existing marketing copy.
Personality
| We are | Which means | But never |
|---|---|---|
| Plainspoken | Says what a number means in everyday words. | Jargon-heavy, or so simplified it becomes wrong. |
| Evidence-led | Cites the source and the method. Comfortable saying "we don’t know." | Hedging on everything, or pretending to certainty we lack. |
| Confident | States findings directly. Ten years of asking for this data has earned a point of view. | Salesy, boastful, or dismissive of the industry we describe. |
| Warm | Remembers there is a person, often a worried one, on the other side of the screen. | Clinical and cold, or chummy and full of exclamation points. |
Tone by moment
The voice stays the same; the tone shifts with what the reader is doing.
| Moment | Tone |
|---|---|
| A price result | Direct and specific. The number first, then what it includes and excludes. |
| An estimate or caveat | Honest without alarm. Say what is uncertain and why, in one sentence. |
| An error | Calm and practical. What happened, and what the reader can do next. |
| An empty state | Helpful. Explain what would normally be here and the quickest way to get there. |
| Methodology | Precise and unhurried. This is where we show the work in full. |
In practice
Terminology
The standard terms and phrases kept the same throughout the experience. Shared by brand and product writing.
| Term | Use it for | Avoid |
|---|---|---|
| Negotiated rate | The price an insurer and a provider have agreed on for a service. | Contracted rate, allowed amount (unless quoting a plan document) |
| Cash price | What a facility charges a patient paying without insurance. | Self-pay price, discounted cash price |
| Estimate | Any figure that is not the reader’s exact out-of-pocket cost. Always labeled. | Quote, cost (when it is really an estimate) |
| In network / Out of network | Two words, no hyphen, sentence case. | In-network, INN, OON |
| Facility | A hospital, surgery center, clinic, or imaging center. | Location, site, vendor |
| Provider | A person or organization that delivers care. Use physician when it is specifically a doctor. | Doctor (as a catch-all), practitioner |
| Plan sponsor | The employer or organization that funds a health plan. | Client, customer, employer (when the sponsor is not an employer) |
| Billing code | A CPT, HCPCS, or DRG code. Name the code set when it matters. | Procedure code, service code |
| Published prices | Prices disclosed under federal transparency rules. | Transparency data, MRF data (in consumer-facing copy) |
Brand assets
A consistent set of assets aligns the experience across product and marketing. The visual foundations live on the style guide home page.
Icons
The shared Icons component. Filled glyphs on a 32px bounding box; see Foundations for the style rules.
ViewIllustration
No illustration style yet. Decide whether we need one before commissioning any.
Photography
No photography guidelines yet.
How we approach common UX patterns, so every product delivers a consistent experience on any platform.
Accessibility
How we approach accessibility and leverage color, hierarchy, and assistive technologies to help our users.
Target
WCAG 2.2 AA across every deployed product. Text and interactive elements meet 4.5:1 contrast; large text and graphics meet 3:1.
Never color alone
Status is always carried by text or an icon as well as color. A red tag reads "Out of network" so the meaning survives without the red.
Keyboard and focus
Every action reachable by keyboard, with a visible focus ring. Tab order follows reading order.
Assistive names
Functional icons carry an accessible name that says what they do. Decorative icons are hidden from screen readers.
Data tables
Prices live in real tables with header cells, captions, and scope. Sortable columns announce their state.
Motion
Respect prefers-reduced-motion. Animations are reduced or removed, never required to understand the page.
Writing guidelines
House style for grammar, formatting, and action-oriented language.
| Rule | Detail |
|---|---|
| Sentence case | Headings, buttons, labels, and tags are all sentence case. Only proper nouns and code sets (CPT, DRG) are capitalized. |
| Second person, active voice | "You can filter by plan," not "Plans may be filtered by the user." |
| Lead with the answer | Put the number, the outcome, or the action in the first sentence. Explanation follows. |
| Currency | Dollar sign, thousands separators, no cents unless cents matter: $1,240 not $1240.00. Ranges use an en dash: $980–$1,410. |
| Numbers | Numerals for everything a reader might compare, including one through nine. Spell out only in prose that is not about quantity. |
| Dates | Month day, year in prose (September 16, 2026). ISO 8601 in tables and exports (2026-09-16). |
| Acronyms | Spell out on first use with the acronym in parentheses. CPT, HMO, and PPO are exceptions in advisor-facing products. |
| Punctuation | Oxford comma. One space after a period. Contractions are fine. No exclamation points in product copy. |
Microcopy guidelines
The standard way to write for the components in the design system.
| Component | Rule |
|---|---|
| Buttons | Verb plus object: "Save plan," "Compare facilities." Never "Submit," "OK," or "Click here." |
| Form labels | A visible label for every field. Placeholders show a format example, never the label itself. |
| Errors | What went wrong and what to do about it, in that order. Never blame the reader and never say "invalid." |
| Empty states | Say what normally appears here and offer the one action that fills it. |
| Loading | Name what is loading when it takes more than a moment: "Finding nearby facilities." Use skeletons for known layouts. |
| Confirmations | State the outcome, not the mechanism: "Plan saved," not "Your request has been processed successfully." |
| Callouts | Title is the takeaway in five words or fewer. Body is one or two sentences. Orange means caveat, blue means context, green means done. |
| Tooltips | Definitions and sources only. Nothing essential lives in a tooltip. |
Internationalisation
Standards for content in other languages, translation edge cases, and bi-directional text.
Languages
US English only. No translation work is planned; every product serves US healthcare pricing.
Formatting
Use Intl.NumberFormat and Intl.DateTimeFormat with the en-US locale rather than hand-rolled formatters, so switching locales later is a configuration change.
Strings
Decide whether product copy should be externalized. Not required today; revisit if Search reaches a Spanish-speaking audience.