What happens to a screen everyone can add to and nobody reviews as a whole, the questions I ask before a cleanup starts, and why a status update can’t stand in for a review.
Every product has a screen that everyone can add to and nobody has to review as a whole. For us, it’s the header at the top of a client’s record. A design director on my team described it to me as the junk drawer of the client experience, and the list backs that up: phone numbers, appointments, adding someone to a waitlist, referrals, sharing, an admin note, editing the client. Each one made sense when a team added it, and together they leave the header no air.
The team that owns the page hadn’t invested in it, because there was no reason to. Now there is one. Our documentation team wants a piece of clinical information to travel with the clinician from the treatment plan to the progress notes, and the header is the natural home for it. Before anyone redesigns anything, the plan is a 4-week audit of every action in the header and a workshop with the teams who put them there, like billing and calendar.
My first question was who owns the header. Then how many teams have a stake in it, and only then how big the build is. I ask in that order because a shared surface with no clear owner turns every cleanup into a negotiation, and the number of stakeholders tells you how long that negotiation will take before you know anything about the build.
The build size is where I’d slow down. When a data source starts fueling something it hasn’t fueled before, that’s usually where we get stuck, and I’ve seen it turn a 4-day estimate into 4 weeks. So the information moving into the header stays on its own, longer track, and the cleanup stays small enough to ship on its own.
When a data source starts fueling something it hasn’t fueled before, that’s usually where a 4-day estimate turns into 4 weeks.
On the design itself, I’d think about progressive reveal. Picture a self-contained sticky header that sits above the record and works as a window: it shows the few things a clinician needs at a glance and exposes the rest, the new clinical information included, when they ask for it. It’s also a big enough change to a screen clinicians use all day that customer support should be in the early crits, so they hear about it while it’s still a sketch and not at launch.
The header isn’t the only shared surface with this problem. A senior designer on my team called out something in our 1:1 that I’ve been thinking about ever since. A change to our navigation had been shared twice inside design and gotten broad agreement, and our product and engineering partners still missed it. Their point was that we don’t have a moment where everyone with a stake in a shared surface has to speak up or live with the result. Someone had suggested that written project updates should be enough, and I told the designer to challenge that. It needs to be a session where we’re looking at the thing together, probing and asking questions.
The audit will clear out this header, and a review where people look at the work together is what keeps the next shared surface from filling up the same way.