Scaling for a Disease-Agnostic Future
Quick Summary
As SimpleReport expanded beyond COVID-19 to support multi-disease testing, I led design efforts to reduce friction in core workflows and lay a foundation for long-term scalability.
My work led to the adoption of a standardized, searchable drop-down for facility selection, increasing task completion from around 33% to 94%.
Impact Highlights
- 100% adoption of a standardized search component
- 94% task completion rate on facility selection (up from 33%)
- Foundation for design system now used across other CDC-Skylight products
Team & Timeline
Over five months, I worked closely with a product manager, another designer, and a team of 12 engineers to identify usability barriers and scale SimpleReport with consistency and care.
Problem
Users, including clinic staff and public health administrators, began encountering long, inconsistent lists throughout the app. A key pain point emerged around selecting the correct facility — a required step when submitting test results.
In SimpleReport, an organization refers to a parent entity (e.g., Los Angeles County Public Health), while a facility is a specific testing site (e.g., Garfield High School). Organization admins often manage hundreds of facilities, making quick and accurate selections essential for timely reporting.
Without proper filtering or search, locating the right facility introduced delays, frustration, and data integrity risks as the platform scaled.
Goals
- Identify and address usability issues exacerbated by technical debt and increased data complexity.
- Ensure that newly added functionality (e.g., multi-disease testing) didn't come at the cost of cognitive overload for users.
- Establish consistent design patterns to support long-term scalability.
- Improve data accuracy and workflow speed by streamlining high-friction steps like facility selection.
Design Process
Research
I led user research to understand how health staff interacted with long lists across the platform. While initial feedback pointed to general navigation friction, a deeper pattern emerged: selecting the correct facility was consistently one of the most painful and high-risk steps in the diagnostic workflow.
As new diseases were added to SimpleReport, the platform’s data footprint grew. Health workers — especially organization admins responsible for managing multiple facilities — had to navigate increasingly long, unstructured lists. The ability to search facility lists was either missing or inconsistently implemented.
In usability testing, participants spent between 45 and 90 seconds locating a facility. Users would often backtrack, second-guess names, or use browser shortcuts like Command+F. One misstep meant routing test results to the wrong department and delaying public health reporting.
These insights steered me to design a standardized, scalable solution for search to improve both the user experience and the integrity of submitted data.
Bridging UX and Engineering
To better understand the root causes behind the inconsistent list behavior, I partnered with engineers to conduct a front-end code audit. Together, we identified that facility lists were being implemented in different ways across the app. These lists had no standard pattern for drop-downs, search, or filtering.
This inconsistency not only made it harder for users to find what they needed, it also introduced bugs, slowed development, and made future scaling difficult.
Our findings set the stage for building a more unified, scalable design system. But first, we needed to address the most immediate source of friction: facility selection.
Quick Wins
To address the friction with organizations with large facility quantities, I introduced a searchable drop-down, leveraging the latest version of the U.S. Web Design System (USWDS).
This small but high-impact change directly improved usability and set a precedent for how we could standardize components moving forward.
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Task completion rate increased to 94%
- Component adopted in 100% of facility selection flows
Design System Foundations
After proving the impact of the searchable dropdown, I began designing and documenting a foundational library of shared components that could be reused across the platform.
We chose the U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) as a base to align with federal accessibility standards.
Building off that foundation, I designed custom components tailored to SimpleReport’s needs. Custom components included test cards for different diseases and sortable tables to better handle growing datasets.
Design System File
Searchable drop-down + sortable tables
Impact and Reflection
The impact of this work was clear in both user experience and team adoption:
- 94% task completion rate for facility selection (up from ~33% during initial testing)
- Component adopted in 100% of facility selection flows
- Design system now referenced in other CDC-Skylight initiatives
Working on SimpleReport taught me how to balance short-term usability fixes with long-term scalability.
The searchable drop-down solved an immediate pain point for facility selection and became a model for how we could bring structure and clarity to a complex, evolving platform.
Not every component in the design system has made it to production, but its foundation is being used across other CDC-Skylight initiatives to drive consistency and scale beyond a single product.
Most importantly, I learned how to advocate for user needs and technical feasibility, shaping how I approach system design on future teams.