Reviving a critical compliance tool to reduce inefficiencies and frustrations.
A tool that could do everything except be used.
Healthcare professionals already have enough to think about without also having to navigate clumsy tools.
symplr's Survey Management was powerful to a fault. Hospital compliance teams relied on it for everything, and dreaded it for the same reason. The hardest job it offered, building surveys whose answers spawn new compliance forms on the fly, was exactly the job people fumbled most.
It had all the power and none of the ease. My job, as Lead Designer, was to keep the power and add the ease without letting either eat the other.
Listening Beyond the Requirements
One conversation changed the direction of the project.
While speaking with a group of nurses, they admitted that they dreaded using the platform.
That's the whole tension of compliance work: the rules are complicated, the people are busy, and "make it simpler" usually means "make it dumber." I wasn't interested in dumber.
So I learned the work cold, from org-wide surveys to targeted questionnaires to the weird edge cases, then went straight to the source. I worked with compliance teams across 10+ hospitals, listening for the specific frustrations that don't show up in feature requests. Then I borrowed shamelessly from the best. The way TurboTax makes a branching, conditional nightmare feel like answering easy questions one at a time? That became the bar.
Designing the Vision
The new design needed to prioritize two people at once: the power user wiring up complex logic, and the participant who just needs a clean, obvious path through. Wireframes and prototypes went round after round until both got what they needed. Accessibility was built into the work from the start, with WCAG standards met throughout.
What Changed
Where it started:
Where it landed:
The Impact
The payoff was real. Survey creation got about 30% faster. It scaled to massive audits, with unlimited users and endless iterations, without breaking a sweat. Anonymous responses meant people could finally tell the truth without fear, giving organizations a clearer picture of actual risk. And the whole thing earned its place as a core piece of symplr's Connected Enterprise suite.
Powerful and usable. Turns out you can have both.