Firstday Healthcare: NICU-level care for preterm babies · 02

Overview

Industry: Healthcare · digital health

The scope: Rework the dashboard’s information architecture, data visualization, and layout to make complex clinical data easier to read, compare, and interpret across roles and viewing conditions.

Role: Product designer (enterprise SaaS, role-based workflows and permissions across provider, admin and hospital account levels)

Team: Agile engineering team · sole designer · worked directly with the founder and product lead, and the CTO

Type: Client work · shipped

The context

Firstday Healthcare delivers NICU-level care for preterm babies: continuous vital-sign monitoring, plus 24/7 access to neonatal providers.
The software behind it is a multi-tenant SaaS platform serving three audiences in one system: the neonatal providers delivering care, admins managing care delivery, and hospital leadership (Customer Account Owners) purchasing and overseeing the service.

I. What’s being designed

The Firstday Healthcare web app serves eight roles. Five of them see this dashboard, with overlapping but not identical data: what differs is which sections they can see and which metrics appear inside them. The layout being designed is a universal page structure that has to hold for every role. If it survives at full complexity, the reduced versions are guaranteed. That requirement has two audiences, and both want the same thing, a page whose structure does not change with who is looking at it:

Users share pages with each other. Colleagues in different roles sit in the same meeting, look at the same screen, and talk about it. The moment a shared section moves or is laid out differently per role, screenshots, training material, and support calls all fragment.
Developers build one page, not five. The layout is a single template. Role logic should be able to remove a block a role is not permitted to see, and do nothing else. If role logic has to rearrange, resize, or re-flow, the team is maintaining five dashboards.

The Customer Account Owner is the role used throughout this case study, for two reasons:

The first is practical: it is the role with access to everything. Designing the fullest version first means every other role is a subtraction from it rather than a separate design.
The second is commercial. The account owner holds the subscription decision, and this page is where that decision gets informed: whether the caseload is staffed, whether babies are coming back, whether the programs work. It is a working tool and the product’s case for itself.

II. The premise: one page because memory is the bottleneck

The legacy product split the account owner’s picture across two pages: live metrics on the Dashboard and historical metrics behind a User Analysis page. Each page made sense on its own, but comparison required moving between them, and comparison is exactly what the account owner needs to do.

This is more than an inconvenience; it is a cognitive constraint. Working memory can hold only a small amount of information at once, and what it holds is fragile. When users interrupt their reasoning to navigate the interface, they risk losing the mental context they have already assembled, and moving to another page creates exactly that interruption. By the time it loads, the dashboard numbers are no longer visible and must instead be recalled from memory. The comparison shifts from recognition to recall. Nielsen’s sixth usability heuristic argues against exactly this pattern: interfaces should minimize memory load by keeping relevant information visible rather than expecting users to remember it across screens.

The redesign therefore begins with a single decision: consolidate the account owner’s dashboard items onto one page.

One honest qualification

The consolidated page does not fit in a single viewport. Comparing the census against the chart still requires scrolling, and scrolling still moves numbers out of sight. Consolidation does not eliminate the memory cost; it reduces it substantially.

The page does not change: the census is still there, in the same place, one flick away. Scrolling is also cheap: no load, no state to re-establish, no decision about how to get back. So the claim is the narrower one: consolidation converts a navigation event into a scroll. It does not make every figure co-visible.

Enter password

This case study is password protected. You’ll find the password on my resume.