Scalable Monitoring Interface for Operational Safety

Overview

This project was a design assignment exploring how a digital interface could support users in monitoring and responding to operational risks.

“It’s 2020. COVID-19 inpatient admissions are surging. Local hospitals are overwhelmed and the Ministry of Health (MoH) has set up a lean operational task force to manage the crisis. There is no unified system — data is fragmented, case processing is manual, and decision-makers are flying blind.”

The brief: design a unified platform with two key components to support both senior decision-makers and frontline operational staff.

2 — The Problem

Three compounding failures were making the crisis harder to manage:

• Hospitals overwhelmed — No unified view of capacity across facilities. Resources couldn’t be allocated efficiently without real-time data.

• Manual case processing — Citizen COVID requests arrived unstructured. Staff had to verify, validate, and assign patients without any dedicated tooling.

• No trend visibility — Decision-makers lacked aggregated data on symptom trends, resolution rates, and hospital load over time.

3 — Two Users, Two Different Problems

	Dashboard	Case Management
Who	MOH senior staff	Operational task force
Context	Crisis meetings, big screens	Processing 30+ cases/hour on mobile
Biggest risk	Acting on stale data	False positives wasting hospital beds

04 — Design Principles

These drove every decision — not aesthetics.

Clarity under pressure — scannable hierarchy, colour that carries meaning, zero noise.

Speed without sacrifice — shortest path to the right action. Friction only where mistakes are costly.

Data, not decoration — charts chosen for comprehension, not visual interest.

Accessible by default — high contrast, large targets. Crisis tools get used in bad conditions.

Part 1 — Real-Time Monitoring Dashboard

Web · For senior MOH staff

The design intent was simple: every element answers How many? How are they trending? Where?

Key decisions:

• Large metric cards readable across a conference room without leaning in

• Donut chart for case resolution — the growing “Unresolved” arc is a visual alarm, no reading required

• Severity threshold alert — when a hospital’s severe cases exceed 80% ICU capacity, the element turns red automatically

• Dual-line area chart shows both Unresolved and Resolved simultaneously — anomalies (spikes, lines crossing) are instant

• Hospital capacity table identifies which facilities need reallocation at a glance

Part 2 — Case Management Platform

Mobile · For operational task force staff

Three screens. One job each.

Case Queue — What needs my attention right now?
Pending cases surface first. Tabs filter by status. No hunting.

Case Review — Is this legit?
Video player centred and anchored. Classification (Positive / Negative / Invalid) must be selected before Submit is enabled — prevents blank submissions under pressure.

Hospital Assignment — Where do I send them?
System recommends the nearest 3 hospitals with available capacity. Staff confirm. Done. No capacity knowledge required.

Reflection

Given more time, I’d push two things: usability testing under actual surge conditions (volume + time pressure), and semi-automating the hospital assignment so staff only confirm rather than choose. That last step could meaningfully reduce decision fatigue at hour three of a surge shift.

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The screens and prototype live in the Figma file — this write-up is just the thinking behind them.