In 2020, businesses that depended on in-person operations faced an impossible question: how do you safely bring employees back to the office during an active pandemic, with public health guidance changing by the week and no existing tools built for the situation?
WorkRadar pulls in public health data — local infection rates, exposure trends, and forecasts — and combines it with daily employee health attestations to give management a real-time picture of office safety. Employees check in each day with a short symptom and exposure questionnaire; management gets a live dashboard to make informed reopening decisions. Designed and built rapidly in response to an urgent, real-world need, with no existing playbook to follow.
WorkRadar was conceived and built during 2020-2021, at the height of COVID-19 uncertainty. There was no precedent for this type of product — no established patterns, no competitor playbooks, and requirements that shifted as CDC guidance evolved week to week. I owned the human-centered design process from concept through interactive prototype, balancing speed (the need was immediate) with the depth of research a healthcare-adjacent product demands.
I led the human-centered design process for WorkRadar from concept through prototype. I researched the various user roles — employees, guests, and management — and identified what data and interactions mattered most to each, leveraging CDC attestation guidance as a foundation.
From there, I built the complete visual identity — branding, color, and UI design — and produced user flows and interactive prototypes for both mobile and desktop, covering the full range of user roles. I worked closely with the front-end development team to ensure design intent translated cleanly into build, and produced user guide documentation for each role to support rollout.
This project was worked on in 2020-2021 while employed at IdeaCrew, Inc., based out of Washington DC
My process adapts to each project, but typically follows these four phases — grounded in the NN Group research framework.
by use of personas
WorkRadar reached the stage of active discussions with a prospective external regional banking company for implementation. Ultimately, the deal didn’t move forward — the project’s timeline extended past the point where COVID-19 restrictions were easing, and the urgent need that drove its creation began to fade alongside it. The product was shelved, but it stands as a complete, working example of rapid concept-to-prototype design under real market evaluation.
Beyond the product itself, WorkRadar was a valuable opportunity for me personally — a chance to design a product from the ground up, outside the constraints of IdeaCrew’s primary legacy platform, and to see a concept carried far enough to be evaluated by a real potential customer.
Unlike most of my work within IdeaCrew’s established design system, WorkRadar allowed me to build a brand from scratch — name, logo, color palette, and visual language — all created to feel approachable and trustworthy during a moment of genuine public anxiety.
