This is a clinical workflow application used by care teams to track a patient’s treatment journey end-to-end—planning, preparation, treatment delivery, monitoring, and follow-ups. The primary “racetrack” tracker view acts as a central hub, letting teams quickly scan what’s done, what’s pending, and what needs attention without jumping across multiple screens.

Role:

Ran alignment workshops, mapped 9 activity groups across 7 roles, explored 8 structural concepts, and validated the solution via A/B testing with real users.

Timeline:

3-4 weeks

Lead product Designer

Team: Product Owner, End user, Jr. UX Designer

Impact:

A scalable horizontal expansion model — 40+ configurable activities, 0 hard-coded task lists, racetrack mental model fully preserved.

Challenge

As the application expanded from radiation workflows to radiopharma, the tracker had to support a much denser and more variable set of activities—without losing the scan-friendly racetrack experience.

Scale limit: The existing racetrack comfortably supported ~20–25 activities, while radiopharma workflows can require 40+ due to staricter monitoring and coordination.
Variability: Tasks differ across radiopharma organizations, so we couldn’t hard-code a single task list.
Must keep: Preserve the racetrack layout and keep it scannable while supporting configurable, customer-specific tasks.

The hardest constraint wasn't adding more — it was scaling without losing the mental model clinicians already depended on.

Process

User Flow: Role-Based Workflow Map

Before exploring design directions, I ran an alignment workshop with the Product Owner and Principal UX Designer to define three non-negotiables: scan-ability must not decrease, the racetrack mental model must be preserved, and the solution must scale to 40+ activities without a hard-coded task list.

I mapped the full radiopharma workflow by role — who uses the product, which tasks they own, and when those tasks occur in the patient journey. This revealed the full scope and helped me group activities to fit within the existing racetrack model.

I consolidated the workflow into 9 primary activity groups, each containing multiple tasks — so the tracker could scale without treating every task as a separate racetrack activity. These underlying tasks are represented through the pill design within each activity group.

Layout Review: Racetrack Baseline

Step 1 — Audit the racetrack row

The existing row mixed patient data, workflow data, and treatment data in one unstructured block. Three problems emerged:

Separate data types: Keep key identifiers visible; move secondary info out of the scan row.
Scattered information: Consolidate patient, workflow, and treatment info so the row stays scannable.
Prioritize tracker space: Give the most width to activities — the core scanning surface.

Journey from import to export with pain points highlighted.

Step 2 — Recover space: Patient strip

By restructuring the patient strip I recovered significant scan space — enabling more activities without reducing clarity.

Restructuring the patient strip reduced its width from 655px to 466px — recovering 189px of horizontal space and redirecting it directly to activities.

Brainstorming

Exploration A

I first tried variations that stayed close to the existing racetrack to preserve familiarity—then documented why they wouldn’t scale.

A1. Status Pills

Limitation: Visually heavy; reduces scan speed as tasks grow.

A2. Circle Markers

Limitation: Requires hover/precision to understand progress, so it’s easy to miss.

A3. Status Cards

Limitation: Shows completion counts but hides which task is blocking.

A4. Nested tasks

Limitation: Adds a “UI inside UI” layer and becomes cluttered as tasks grow.

A5. Dot Track

Limitation: Scales in quantity, but individual tasks become hard to distinguish.

A6. Pills + Dots

Limitation: Collapses multiple tasks into one visual, reducing clarity and ownership.

A7. Line Track

Limitation: Too subtle at a glance; users may overlook urgency or meaning.

A8. Activity Cards

Limitation: Improves readability, but consumes too much horizontal space for scale.

Visual refinements helped, but none scaled cleanly past 40+ tasks—so I moved to structural concepts.

Exploration B: Structural concepts shortlisted for scale

Next, I explored three structural concepts to scale task visibility while keeping the racetrack scan-friendly.

B1 — Role-Based Pills

Idea: Group tasks under each activity by role so teams can complete role-owned work together.

Tradeoff: Cross-role dependencies are less visible, and reaching tasks still takes ~2 clicks.

B2 — Activity Blocks (Vertical list)

Idea: Reveal tasks vertically under each activity via a dropdown/stacked list.

Tradeoff: Changes the racetrack look-and-feel and feels less consistent with the current application.

B3 — Horizontal Task Expansion

Idea: Expand tasks horizontally under an activity for more direct access.

Tradeoff: Requires a click to expand, can push other activities off-screen, and still hits a horizontal scaling ceiling.

Quick A/B Comparison

Exploration B gave us 3 viable directions—but each traded off scan speed, familiarity, and task access. We compared them with users to confirm which concept could scale to radiopharma complexity without breaking the racetrack mental model.

Why Horizontal Task Expansion won: It was the only concept that scored positively on all three non-negotiables. Role-Based Pills failed on cross-role dependency visibility — a critical requirement when multiple team members own tasks within the same activity. Activity Blocks broke the racetrack mental model entirely. Horizontal Task Expansion preserved scan-ability and familiarity while solving the scale problem through controlled expansion.

Solution

State 1 — Collapsed (scan view)

State 2 — Expanded (work view)

Decision line: Chose Horizontal Task Expansion because it best balanced scan-ability + familiarity while improving task access (with controlled expansion).

Conclusion

From

A tracker built for radiation workflows
Limited to ~25 activities, hard-coded tasks, not designed for radiopharma's 40+ variable, site-specific requirements.

A scalable racetrack system
Configurable to 40+ activities per site, zero retraining required, same scan pattern clinicians already depended on daily..

What I Learned

Designing for scale isn't about adding more — it's about structure that lets complexity breathe. The hardest constraint was preserving the existing mental model while fundamentally reorganising what sat beneath it.

What's next

Validate scan speed with real clinical coordinators pre and post
Stress-test at scale — 40+ activities, long task names, varied screen sizes
Enable inline task additions without leaving the tracker view

Activity Tracker Redesign

Helping clinicians spot what’s next—faster