Product design for complex clinical workflows

About

Why I design for the people who care for everyone else

I grew up with a mom who was a nurse, so I saw early what the job actually costs, and I always knew I wanted to do something that lightened the load for people like her. I also knew my gift wasn't in my hands the way hers was. It was in how I see and explain things. Visual thinking was how I could help; design became the tool.

What pointed me at healthcare wasn't the industry, it was watching the people in it. I saw clinicians exhausted and swamped, burning hours on notes and overtime instead of the patients they got into this to help. I wanted to give some of that time and attention back. That's the work I spent three years on as the sole designer on a clinical EHR used by thousands of mental health clinicians, where I was promoted to Senior as my scope grew from interface redesign to the design system, the AI interaction model, and the dev-ready specs underneath.

Before I ever opened Figma, years in customer service and training taught me to hear past what someone says to what they actually need. That turned out to be the whole job. When clinicians told me the software just needed to "look better," the real problem was speed; when they asked for more on a screen, the real problem was hierarchy. Finding the gap between the stated complaint and the underlying need is the instinct I lean on most, and it's why I don't just execute a brief, I interrogate it first.

My craft took shape in an intensive lock-step design program, four years of curriculum compressed into two, where I stopped treating visual design and human-computer interaction as separate things and learned to make them serve each other.