Case study · Product design

Navigation redesign

Finding out what to do today meant checking three separate sections of the app, each showing everything you'd ever been assigned, not just what mattered right now. I designed a unified daily task concept and broke the redesign into scoped pieces the team could actually build from.

Tools: Claude, Linear
Skills: Product design, User research, Information architecture, Navigation systems, Interaction design, Prototyping, Feature scoping

Final redesigned home screen showing a unified daily task list

Final design

The old navigation

This started from a conversation I brought up with the product team. Navigation had fragmented across too many sections. Patients recovering from an injury don't have a long attention span for tracking down what to do next or where to go. Program, Communications, and Education each lived in their own card. Nothing on the home screen showed what actually needed attention today. The screen below shows that structure.

Old home screen with separate Program, Check-in, Communication, and Guidance cards — Old home screen · Separate cards for each section

Opening any one of those cards led to the same problem: a single long list of everything a patient had ever been assigned, with no distinction between what was due today and what wasn't. The three screens below show that pattern repeating across Program, Communications, and Education.

Old Program screen showing a flat list of all exercises — Program · Every exercise, undifferentiated

Old Communication screen showing a flat list of all items — Communications · Every item, no urgency shown

Old Education screen showing a flat list of lessons — Guidance · A flat list of lessons

Concept and prototype

The starting point was open-ended: explore some kind of daily task concept for the home screen. The real problem underneath it was clear to me: patients had no single place to see what they actually needed to do that day. I built a full interactive prototype that answered that question directly, pulling relevant items from Program, Communications, and Education into one prioritized list. Communications also got a focused one-question-at-a-time flow instead of a scrollable list. The recording below is that prototype.

Interactive prototype of the daily task list home screen — Prototype · Daily task list and focused communication flow

The screen below is a closer look at that focused communication flow, one question at a time instead of a scrollable list, prototyped in Claude alongside the rest of the concept.

Prototype of a single-question communication flow asking how a splint is fitting — Prototype · One-question-at-a-time communication flow

Scoping the redesign

Rather than one large redesign, I broke the work into three sequenced tickets: a consolidated Library to replace three separate navigation destinations, and a shared horizontal flow so Communications worked like Program already did. The third redefined the home screen itself around a single daily task list, finally answering the question patients kept running into: what do I actually need to do today. The screen below shows where that Library work landed.

Final redesigned Library screen with Exercises, Communications, and Lessons tabs

Final Library · Exercises (Program), Communications, and Lessons (Education) in one place

What I'd take from it

Building the daily task list around one question, what does a patient need to do today, is what actually solved it. It's the lens I'd apply to any feature spanning multiple parts of a product, design around the single moment a user needs, not how the backend or navigation happens to be organized. Scoping the redesign into three focused tickets also had a side benefit I hadn't planned for. It let two designers work in parallel, each staying close enough to the other's work to give useful feedback.

Next projectOnboarding RedesignThe same patient interviews and survey data shaped both redesigns.