ChartRequest
A unified design system and operations platform for medical records exchange used by hospitals, clinics and legal teams.
- Role
- Senior Product Designer
- Timeline
- Ongoing
- Platform
- Web · Operations Platform
- Year
- 2024–2026
ChartRequest connects patients, healthcare providers and requesters to move medical records securely and compliantly. Over years of growth the product had accumulated inconsistent patterns across dozens of internal and external surfaces. I led the design-system-first rebuild, establishing tokens, primitives and shared components, then applying them to the highest-traffic operations pages.
What wasn't working
Every team shipped its own version of the same table, dialog and form. Density, spacing and status language drifted between screens, which slowed engineering and made the platform feel harder to trust for compliance-sensitive users.
What success looked like
- Create one token-driven system that light and dark, marketing and product could all share.
- Reduce time-to-ship for common flows by giving engineers pre-solved primitives.
- Raise the perceived quality and trustworthiness of every operations surface.
- Keep daily-use admin pages fast and familiar for power users while modernising the shell.
What I learned first
- Audited 40+ existing screens to inventory every table, filter, status and empty state.
- Interviewed internal operations staff who live in these tools eight hours a day.
- Mapped the real jobs behind each page rather than porting the legacy layout 1:1.
- Benchmarked against Linear, Stripe and enterprise console patterns for density and calm.
The hard parts
- Balancing a modern shell with the muscle memory of power users on daily-use pages.
- Defining status language that stays legible across nine+ workflow states.
- Scaling strokes, radii and spacing so components feel right from chips to full-page tables.
How I worked through it
- 01
Foundations
Defined semantic color tokens, an 8pt spacing scale, radius and elevation. Everything downstream binds to these.
- 02
Primitives
Built the shared DataTable, StatusPill, ConfirmDialog and PageHeader as the vocabulary every page reuses.
- 03
Application
Restyled the highest-traffic pages in place, keeping section order and jump navigation intact for daily users.
- 04
Documentation
Paired Figma library and code so a component means the same thing in design and production.
Structure before surface
Low-fidelity structure first, table density, filter placement and the anatomy of each status before any color went on the screen.
The path a user takes
- 1Operator lands on a work queue filtered to their role
- 2Scans status pills to triage what needs action
- 3Opens a record, acts, and confirms through a consistent dialog
- 4State updates propagate with the same language everywhere
Where it landed
A calm, high-density operations platform where tables breathe, status is unmistakable, and every action feels like part of one system.
What changed
- 1
- Shared system across product & marketing
- 40+
- Screens audited and unified
- Faster
- Ship time for common flows
- Higher
- Perceived trust on compliance surfaces
What I took away
- A design system earns its keep only when the busiest pages adopt it.
- Restyle in place before you reorganise, respect the workflows people already trust.
- Tokens are law, but components shouldn't be a ceiling on the best experience.
The most satisfying part wasn't any single screen, it was watching the platform start to feel like it was designed by one mind. Consistency, at this scale, is a feature.