Increasingly emerging use of Cannabis for pain management warrants the need for recommendations and guidelines in place for patients to navigate their use effectively. We conducted a secondary data analysis of 11 interviews with patients who consumed marijuana for chronic pain. The purpose of this study was to understand how patients with chronic pain manage their symptoms with cannabis. By applying the user centered design process, we identified pain points and gaps in how different patients procured, used and managed their cannabis use. We identified three distinct use cases and modeled these use cases using experience maps and developed personas describing the stories of medical cannabis users. The journey of patients in learning, obtaining and using medical cannabis were mapped into tasks and subtasks with the help of charts to recognize gaps in overall experience. The reported challenges include: (1) finding information about cannabis for pain vs other medications, (2) finding trusted information, (3) doctors being hesitant to prescribe medical cannabis, (4) cost factors (5) need for monitoring by doctors to advise patients about usage. We developed design guidelines for applications or tools to support patients’ use of alternative medicines grounded in patient experiences. The design guidelines address the challenges of the study by helping patients log in the symptoms, side effects and strain information making it easy to track their use of cannabis over time using technology.