Nick BlakeProduct Designer




SimpleReport - Expanding CDC's testing platform beyond COVID
SimpleReport is a tool that staff at organizations use to quickly record and report the results of rapid diagnostic tests. 

SimpleReport was originally designed for COVID tests at the height of the pandemic. 

As a Senior Product Designer, I worked to ensure the tool could accommodate multiple test types while streamlining core workflows.

Leveraging Research
Through synthesizing existing user research, I helped my team to identify and prioritize user pain points that were high priority to address. 


Mapping the user journey across three user types revealed two key opportunities:

  1. How might we allow staff to run different types of tests?
  2. How might we streamline how staff register patients?


Enabling multi-disease testing
Previously, admin users had to contact the support team to enable testing for multiple conditions, taking up to two days before organizations could test for conditions. 



I designed a self-service device management interface so users can configure new tests in minutes instead of days, contributing to a 73% reduction in support tickets.

Streamlining Patient Registration
Before users can start testing, they need to enter patient information.  When a few patients enter a facility each day, individual entry works fine.  But for settings with 200 students or 300 nursing home residents, manual entry became a bottleneck. 


To help users navigate CSV formatting, I worked with engineers to design granular error messaging that pinpointed exactly which areas of the file needed correction.



Validation patterns reduced failed uploads by 60% and eliminated the need for support intervention.



Bulk upload reduced patient registration from 30+ minutes to under 5 for facilities with 100+ patients.

Evolving the Design System
As SimpleReport scaled to support more disease types and higher patient volumes, inconsistent UI patterns were slowing down users.

To address this, I led the effort to unify our design system into a single source of truth for design and engineering, untangling styles inherited from multiple contributors, including Microsoft Metro, various United States Web Design (USWDS) versions 1.x–3.x, and ad-hoc decisions.

You can check out how we organized the Figma here. 

Custom components included enhanced tables with sorting and accessible form validation.


A considerations doc I created to align engineering, product, and design on the problem to earn buy-in for a unified system.


By leading a design and engineering audit, I helped my team prioritize which components to update in production.

Key learnings
Keeping accessibility a priority throughout.
By iterating on contrast ratios, I ensured color-blind users could distinguish between enabled and disabled states, making the tool accessible for everyone in public health settings

Designers need to define and track user success metrics.
Beyond operational metrics, I advocated for tracking user-facing measures like upload success rates to ensure we optimized for actual usability, not just system performance.

Design decisions ripple across user roles.
Changes for admin users often affected standard downstream. Investing in user flows and role maps helped me track these dependencies and anticipate impact.

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