Imagine a shared task board used by an entire care team — doctors, nurses, coordinators — to manage every step of a patient's treatment. Each row is a patient. Each column is a task in their care journey. The goal is simple: anyone on the team should be able to look at the board and instantly know what's been done, what's still pending, and what urgently needs attention — all without having to open individual patient files.

This is the story of how that board stopped working when the complexity of patient care doubled — and how we redesigned it to scale.

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.

The problem

A tool built for simplicity — suddenly asked to handle complexity

Think of this product like a shared task board used by an entire care team — physicians, nurses, coordinators — to manage every step of a patient's treatment. Each row is a patient. Each column is a phase of their care journey. The goal: anyone on the team should glance at the board and instantly know what's done, what's pending, and what urgently needs attention.

Originally built for one treatment type with a predictable ~13 tasks per patient, the board worked well. Then the product expanded to support a newer, more complex treatment type where patients had 40+ tasks — and every hospital's list looked different.

~13

tasks — original design

✓ Scan-friendly. Everything visible at a glance.

Same layout

→

40+

tasks — new workflows

↑ Screen cluttered — scanning impossible

↑ No standard list — every hospital differed

Three things could not change

01

Scan speed

Physicians had to glance and know — adding more tasks couldn't slow that down

02 Familiar layout

Teams couldn't relearn a new system mid-work — the existing structure had to stay

03 Flexibility to scale

Must support 40+ tasks that varied from one hospital site to the next

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

Process

Understand

User interviews + workflow map

Audit layout

Patient strip reorganisation

Visual exploration

8 visual directions tested

Structural exploration

3 structural concepts

Decide

A/B comparison + final call

Step 01 — Understand

Talk first, design later

Before sketching anything, I ran quick interviews with the physicians and care coordinators who used the product daily. I wanted to understand not just what the tasks were — but how the team thought about them. What felt urgent? What got missed? How did they mentally move through a patient's journey?

From those conversations, I mapped the full workflow by role — charting every person, every task they owned, and when in the care journey that task happened. This gave me the full scope of what we needed to support, and the first clue that those 40+ tasks weren't random — they clustered naturally into phases.

Patient journey — from Visit to treatment

13 activities identified across this journey — all tracked manually, with no single person seeing the full picture

Step 02 — Audit layout

Fix what's around it before fixing the thing itself

Before redesigning how tasks were displayed, I audited the patient information area — the left-side section of each board row. Patient data, workflow data, and treatment data were all mixed together with no clear order or priority.

Reorganising that section by type — grouping the right information together and moving secondary details out of view — recovered significant horizontal space that could be redirected to tasks.

Before — scattered

655px wide

Mixed data types, no clear priority

After — grouped

466px wide

Grouped logically — same info, less space

→189px recovered

Step 03 — Visual exploration

Can visual changes alone solve this?

With more space to work with, I turned to the core question: how do you show 40+ tasks without visual chaos? My first instinct was to stay close to the existing design — try different visual styles without changing the underlying structure.

I explored eight variations and documented exactly where each one broke down.

Status pills

Limitation: Visually heavy — scan speed drops as tasks grow

Circle markers

Limitation: Requires hover precision to understand — easy to miss

Status cards

Limitation: Shows counts but hides which task is actually blocking

Nested tasks

Limitation: UI-inside-UI — becomes cluttered as tasks grow

Dot track

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

Pills + dots

Limitation: Collapses multiple tasks into one visual, reducing clarity

Line track

Limitation: Too subtle at a glance — urgency and meaning get lost

Activity cards

Limitation: Readable, but consumes too much horizontal space to scale

— The insight —

40+ tasks don't have to be shown all at once

This became the structural foundation. Instead of showing everything at once, what if we organized by phase — and only revealed the detail within a phase when someone needed it?

Tasks clustered into 5 natural groups

40+ tasks → 5 natural groups → structure for the solution

Patient Enrollment

First contact to system entry

Coordination

Scheduling & approvals

Pre-Treatment

Checks before the procedure

Treatment

The procedure itself

Post-Treatment

Follow-up & monitoring

These 5 groups became the structural backbone of the redesign

Step 04 — Structural exploration

Rethinking the structure — three directions

With 5-phase grouping as the backbone, I explored three different ways to let physicians navigate within those groups — each with a different tradeoff between scan speed, familiarity, and how quickly someone could reach an individual task.

B1 — Role-based view

Group tasks by who owns them

Each phase shows tasks filtered by the physician's role — so a nurse sees nurse tasks, a coordinator sees coordinator tasks only.

Tradeoff: Task handoffs between team members become invisible — and in care workflows, those handoffs are critical. Missing one isn't just a UX problem.

B2 — Vertical expansion

Clicking a phase opens tasks downward

Each phase column has a dropdown — clicking it reveals tasks stacked beneath, like an accordion list.

Tradeoff: Rows expand downward, pushing content off screen and breaking the horizontal scan pattern physicians depended on daily.

✓ Chosen direction

B3 — Horizontal expansion

Clicking a phase expands it sideways

A phase column expands horizontally to reveal the tasks within it. The row stays the same height — nothing shifts vertically.

Why it worked: You get the detail when you need it, the clean overview when you don't — without losing your place in the board.

Step 05 — Decide

Three concepts, one winner

I compared all three structural directions with users against five criteria — the three non-negotiables from the start, plus two more that surfaced during testing.

Why horizontal expansion won

It was the only concept that held up on all three non-negotiables. The role-based view failed because it hid handoffs between team members — critical when multiple people share ownership of a phase. Vertical expansion broke the scan pattern entirely by pushing content downward, destroying the horizontal flow physicians relied on. Horizontal expansion preserved the familiar layout, scaled to 40+ tasks, and required zero retraining for existing users.

The result

One board, two modes

The final design operates in two states. In the default view, the board looks and behaves exactly as before — every patient in a row, every phase in a column, fully scannable at a glance. When a physician needs to dig into a specific phase, one click expands that column sideways. Tasks appear in place. Nothing shifts. No context is lost.

State 1 — Scan view (default)

Glance down the list. See which patients need attention and exactly where — at a board level.

State 2 — Work view (expanded)

Click a phase. Tasks expand sideways. Row height stays the same — no context is lost.

Conclusion And Learning

What the redesign actually changed

From

A board built for simpler workflows

Limited to ~25 tasks, a hard-coded task list that couldn't adapt to different treatment types or hospital sites — and a layout that collapsed under the new workload.

A configurable board that scales

Supports 40+ tasks per site, fully configurable to each care team's requirements, same familiar scan experience physicians already relied on — zero retraining required.

"Designing for scale isn't about adding more — it's about structure that lets complexity breathe."

What I took away from this project

The hardest part wasn't the final design. It was preserving the mental model physicians already relied on, while fundamentally reorganising what sat underneath it. Every decision was measured against that constraint — and it made every trade-off clearer.

What's next

Still to validate

Validate scan speed with real clinical coordinators

Measure time-to-identify before and after the redesign with actual users in a clinical setting

Stress-test at full scale

40+ tasks, long task names, varied screen sizes — push the design to its real-world limits

Enable inline task additions

Allow care teams to add or modify tasks directly from the board view without navigating away

Activity Tracker Redesign

What happens when a tool built for simplicity suddenly has to handle complexity — without slowing anyone down?