Allowing charge nurses to make shift assignments quickly and without bias.
Capital One hosts pro bono volunteer cycles every year, and I was excited to join a team to improve the charge nurse experience for Nightingale Caring Solutions.
I have always been interested in UX in healthcare and wanted to apply my design skills to a cause outside of my usual industry.
Nightingale Caring Solutions is a brand new product that allows charge nurses to create shift assignments in an automated, unbiased way. The client was hoping to get feedback from designers on specific areas of improvement and suggestions on the UX and UI.
Currently, it is normal industry wide for charge nurses to create shift assignments manually on pencil and paper. It is a very tedious and manually process in an environment that is already fast paced and stressful. Having a more automated and quick way to make these assignments in a way that is still fair would lighten the burden for charge nurses.
> How might we
How might we give charge nurses a faster way to build shift assignments so they can focus less on paperwork and more on their already demanding day?
I conducted 4 interviews with nurses (3 nurses and 1 charge nurse). Ideally, we would have had two interviews per participant to do discovery on their pain points and experiences creating nurse shift assignments, but due to time constraints, we had to combine these interviews into one.
The nurse's mental model is to drag a nurse into a room, not add a room to a nurse — but the product only supported the latter.
Allow nurses to drag and drop a nurse directly into a room, matching how they already drag a nurse into a shift.
Similar button styling across the platform made it hard to tell which actions mattered most, like primary vs. advanced setup.
Adopt a primary/secondary button pattern — a filled, high-contrast button for the main action, and a ghost or text-link style for alternatives.
Nurses had a general sense of the Workload Score but weren't sure exactly how or where it was being used.
Add a tooltip next to the Workload Score explaining what it means and how it factors into assignments.
Setting a charge nurse was difficult because the action only appeared on hover, making it easy to miss entirely.
Add an overflow icon to nurses (similar to rooms) with a clearly labeled "Charge nurse" button underneath it.
As part of our final shareout with the client, we prepared a deck summarizing all our work and findings from the past 4 months. I loved the opportunity to dive into a space very different from the fintech industry and found it very fulfilling to design for a different audience!
View deck →