An iPad-native tool for field representatives.
Designing a tablet dashboard for healthcare reps who needed real information, in real time, on the road.
Equip a fleet of healthcare field representatives with a purpose-built iPad tool — one designed for the realities of on-site work, not a desktop port.
Lead UX designer responsible for research, information architecture, and end-to-end interaction design across the iPadOS experience.
A tailored dashboard that gave reps measurable wins in efficiency and confidence during on-site engagements.
The challenge
Healthcare field reps work in clinics, hospitals, and offices — short windows of time, complex information, constant context-switching. Their tools have historically been built for desks, not for them.
Collaborating with a healthcare company, we set out to design a tailored iPad experience that gave the field team a tool actually shaped around how they work: portable, glanceable, fast to navigate between accounts, and credible enough to be pulled out in front of a clinician without explanation.
The brief wasn't just "make a tablet version of the desktop tool." It was: design what these reps would have asked for, if they'd ever been asked.
How I approached it
The work hinged on contextual research — understanding the *moment* a rep would actually use this thing.
Ride-alongs & interviews
Time with reps in the field surfaced the real problems — too many taps, brittle offline behavior, info buried where they couldn't reach it quickly.
Information architecture
Restructuring the data model around the rep's mental model — by account, by visit, by next action — instead of mirroring the back-end schema.
iPadOS-native patterns
Using native interactions — split views, drag-and-drop, contextual menus — so the tool felt at home on the device, not like a web app in a frame.
Test with real reps
Prototypes back in front of the same field team — measuring whether tasks that used to take six taps now took two.
Decisions that mattered
Designing for one-handed use, not two
Reps often hold the iPad in one arm while talking. Critical actions were placed within thumb-reach on the non-dominant side, and dangerous actions (delete, send) were placed deliberately further away.
Glanceable over comprehensive
The default dashboard view is intentionally sparse — what does this rep need to know in the next 30 seconds? Detail is one tap away, but the surface stays calm.
Offline-first, sync-quietly
Field locations have unreliable signal. We designed the interaction model assuming offline as the default state, with sync as a background process the rep never has to babysit.
What changed
Specific metrics covered in the full case study (request access below). Public-facing highlights:
A tool the reps actually picked up — adopted as their default rather than a parallel system to their old workflow.
Core workflows compressed significantly compared to the prior tool — task-completion time dropped in usability testing.
Reps described the app as feeling like "an actual iPad app" — not a generic web view. Credibility in front of clinicians went up.
Field locations with poor signal stopped being a blocker. Sync became something the rep didn't have to think about.
What I'd carry forward
You can't design for a context you've never seen. Ride-alongs were worth more than any number of stakeholder reviews — and would now be table-stakes on any field-tool project I work on.
"Native patterns" is a UX decision, not a styling decision. Choosing iPadOS interactions over web abstractions changed what the tool *felt* like in the rep's hand.
Restraint scales. Resisting the urge to surface every available data point made every screen more useful.
Want to see the actual designs?
The complete case study — with screens, IA artifacts, and impact data — is available as a password-protected PDF. Drop your details and I'll send it over.