Home Page/Navigation: A New Paradigm

Designing the foundational navigation framework for Meditech’s next-generation of products - aligning multiple teams around a shared vision for how users interact with the product.

Context

Meditech, the third-largest hospital Electronic Health Record (EHR) provider, began rebuilding several core applications in 2025, including the Laboratory Information System (LIS) and Imaging.

The effort rethought the product from the ground up—codebase, workflows, interaction patterns, information architecture, and a new design system.

I joined the Laboratory team at the start of this initiative. One of the first cross-department efforts was a collaboration with Imaging to define a shared home page and navigation framework for the new applications—an initiative that became known as the Home Page / Navigation Scrum.

Problem

At the beginning of the project, the navigation system had no shared vision or guiding principles.

Several issues quickly surfaced:

  • Multiple teams began designing their own home pages independently

  • Developers started implementing solutions without user research

  • There was no agreement on what a dashboard, workspace, or widget meant

  • The project timeline required a coded visual to be presented within a month

Because the project started in a chaotic environment, the team spent months debating competing design directions without making progress.

A decision was made to pause development in order to allow designers to perform appropriate user-centered research.

My Role

The team was built with a Laboratory UX Designer, myself, and an Imaging UX Designer.

My responsibilities included:

  • Conducting user interviews

  • Synthesizing research into actionable design principles

  • Defining the conceptual framework of the home page and navigation system

  • Establishing terminology and documentation used across teams

  • Collaborating with the Imaging team, developers, product owners, and design system team

  • Designing low-fidelity prototypes to align stakeholders and all designers on the navigation model

Traveling to Toronto, Ontario for site visits to leading Canadian hospitals

Laboratory users want to perform 70% of their daily tasks from that first screen. These are simple tasks.

For the remaining 30% that are more complex, the user then wants to go dig in to additional screens.

Solutions

Establishing Research-Driven Navigation

I conducted interviews with laboratory professionals to understand how they expected to interact with the system. Instead of focusing on what should appear on the home page, the research focused on how users navigate their work throughout the day.

A clear insight emerged across interviews:

Users want to perform most of their daily work from the initial screen.

This led to a foundational design principle:

Approximately 70% of tasks should be completed directly from the home page, while the remaining 30% should be accessible through deeper workflows.

This principle gave the team a clear decision-making framework and shifted conversations away from individual preferences toward user-centered design.

Designing a Shared Navigation Framework

Based on the research, I helped define a consistent navigation structure composed of four persistent elements:

  • Header for global tools such as search and settings

  • Left navigation menu for accessing major workflows

  • Center workspace where users perform their primary tasks

  • Right reference region containing widgets and alerts

This framework created a stable navigation shell that remains consistent across the application while allowing different workflows to appear in the central workspace.

Because Laboratory and Imaging were both rebuilding their applications simultaneously, this structure also served as a shared foundation across teams.

Introducing Workspaces

Research revealed that laboratory professionals rarely complete one task at a time. Instead, they frequently switch contexts as new work arrives.

To support this behavior, we replaced the legacy concept of routines with workspaces—flexible environments where users can begin a task, leave it open, and return to it later.

The user can also open more than one Workspace at once, navigating from their initial workspace, but also from a widget or nav menu.

If the user needs a larger Workspace they can expand it to take over their whole screen. But everything is present from that initial home page.

Pain Points

  • Early project chaos created competing design directions

  • Many stakeholders across the organization wanted input on foundational decisions

  • The design system was still being built, limiting available components

  • Multiple applications needed to align on the same navigation structure

This project reinforced that in large enterprise environments, UX is often about alignment as much as design.

The biggest challenge was not designing the navigation itself—it was establishing a shared understanding of the problem across dozens of stakeholders.

By grounding discussions in research and clearly defining core concepts, we were able to move conversations away from personal preferences and toward a shared product vision.

Sometimes the most impactful UX work is not designing polished interfaces—it’s establishing the foundational rules that everything else can build upon.