Healthcare teams using Nilo Care for navigating their patients started facing new challenges when they started working with larger number patients: inefficient, manual workflows that slowed down care coordination and patient engagement. There was also still no way to sort patients by defining a set of conditions. We had long recognized the need for an Automation feature to streamline processes, reduce administrative overhead, and improve scalability.
This feature aimed to empower hospital directors and care team managers by automating repetitive tasks, ensuring timely actions, and enhancing patient engagement. Despite its high demand across the company, it had yet to be designed and prioritized for development.
As the Senior Product Designer, I owned the end-to-end design process, collaborating closely with:
• The Head of Product to align on strategic goals
• A Principal Engineer to ensure technical feasibility
• The Clinical Director to validate healthcare data accuracy
My responsibilities included:
• Conducting research and stakeholder interviews
• Defining user flows and interface structure
• Guaranteeing that the feature would be designed to work for simple and complex automations
• Prototyping and testing multiple design approaches
• Delivering a development-ready solution
The design work was 95% complete, pending final product decisions before engineering implementation was prioritized by Product leadership.
Senior Product Designer
• User Interviewing
• Benchmarking research
• Synced on specs with Engineers & PM
• UX/UI Design
• User Testing
Head of Product
1 Software Engineer
1 month
Understanding the complexity of automation in healthcare
To ensure the Automation feature effectively addressed real-world challenges, I conducted extensive research through stakeholder interviews, and industry benchmarking.
I had multiple meetings with Nilo’s Clinical Director to understand a framework that could infer a patient’s potential health conditions based on their health insurance usage patterns, even before a formal diagnosis was available. After analyzing how this system worked, I was able to prove to the team that the automation feature was far more complex than initially anticipated, requiring a more sophisticated design approach.
To further refine the solution, I:
• Interviewed hospital directors and care team managers to map workflows and identify challenges in automation setup.
• Benchmarked industry-leading automation tools across different industries, analyzing best practices in UX and system logic.
Key Insights
1. Automation builders would be used by a select group (typically Directors or Care Team Managers) rather than regular hospital staff.
2. Even high-level professionals struggled with certain automation complexities, especially in determining the right parameters for efficient workflows.
3. The interface had to be intuitive to ensure users fully understood their configurations. Mistakes could lead to serious consequences in patient care and require complex work from engineering to revert.
4. Some automations, specially complex ones, could be offered as templates for clients, allowing them to tailor minor details to their own needs.
Design Approach
I explored multiple UX patterns for presenting the content and actions to users, to ensure the interface was:
1. Scalable for different automation needs
2. Intuitive for hospital staff unfamiliar with complex automation tools
3. Compliant with healthcare data regulations
Through multiple iterations of usability testing with hospital directors, I explored different interface approaches to optimize usability. Initially, I followed a request from the Head of Product to keep the UI as simple as possible due to a limited number of frontend engineers available to build the feature. Once I had a version that met this requirement, I tested it with real users, but they struggled to complete the assigned tasks during usability testing.
After gathering detailed feedback, I proposed a new approach that improved clarity and usability. To assess feasibility, I consulted the frontend engineers, who estimated that implementing my solution would only be about 10% more complex, as it leveraged existing design system tokens and components.
I then tested this improved version with users, and they were able to complete tasks much more easily. With this data in hand, I presented my findings to the Head of Product and successfully convinced him that this approach was the best way forward. Once aligned, I proceeded to design the remaining interfaces, user flows, and corner cases.
Final Design Solution
→ A structured automation builder interface that balanced detailed rule-setting with a high-level overview area, allowing users to see how different conditions and rules interacted, divided in different steps. This ensured clarity in complex automation setups.
→ A Library of Automations that provided:
• Editable templates for clients to quickly configure and adapt to their needs.
• Proprietary templates created by Nilo that were partially locked to maintain best practices and compliance.
• A clean, structured UI that maintained intuitiveness while supporting complex logic, ensuring users could configure automations with confidence.
The final design was development-ready, offering a scalable, user-friendly solution that empowered healthcare teams to streamline workflows efficiently.
Validated through research & usability testing
The initial design faced usability challenges, but after iterative testing and improvements, users were able to successfully complete tasks with ease. The final version provided a clear structure for configuring complex automation rules, reducing cognitive load and potential errors.
Highly anticipated across the company
This feature was widely recognized as a critical tool for scaling healthcare operations. Teams across Nilo had been requesting automation capabilities for a long time, and the final design addressed major workflow inefficiencies that had been slowing down hospital directors and care managers.
Designed for real impact
By streamlining manual processes, the Automation feature had the potential to free up valuable time for healthcare professionals, allowing them to focus on higher-value patient care instead of repetitive administrative work.
The addition of an Automation Library further increased efficiency by providing pre-built templates that could be quickly adapted, reducing setup time.
The feature would finally enable streamlined automation for both Nilo Care and Nilo Capta, the Care Navigation and Engagement at Scale products I designed at Nilo.
Despite not being shipped yet, this project demonstrates my ability to lead complex enterprise automation design, collaborate cross-functionally, and create solutions that drive efficiency at scale. The depth of research, usability validation, and strategic iteration show how I approach enterprise product design in high-stakes, regulated industries.
