Combat Medic App: App Design for Medics Under Fire

The Situation:
I was brought into a project supporting medics working in some of the most intense conditions imaginable—combat zones, disaster sites, field hospitals. The app was meant to help them track vitals, assign triage categories, log injuries, and manage handoffs in real time. In theory, it was a life-saving tool. In practice, it was slow, cluttered, and not intuitive for people trying to move fast under pressure. And when you're out in the field with limited time, gear in your hands, gloves on, and lives depending on you, bad UX isn’t just annoying—it’s dangerous.

What I Did:
My job was to step in and make the thing usable. That meant understanding the real-world constraints and designing for how people actually work, not how we wish they did. Here’s what I focused on:

• Cognitive Load Reduction: I tore down every screen and asked, “What needs to be here?” I reduced the number of taps it took to do high-frequency tasks like logging a vitals check or updating triage status.
• Field Usability: I made sure the interface worked with gloves, shaky hands, dirty screens, and low visibility. We used high-contrast designs and large tap targets to make things feel accessible in less-than-ideal conditions.
• Workflow Mapping: I worked closely with medics, PMs, and engineers to re-map the core workflows—especially around patient handoffs and mass casualty scenarios. That included visualizing the entire patient journey, from initial triage to field evacuation.
• Compliance + Safety: I cross-referenced our design changes with NIST safety-critical UX guidelines and stayed aligned with DoD compliance standards throughout the process. We didn’t just want something sleek—we needed something that could be trusted.
• Heuristic Audits: I ran a detailed heuristic evaluation of the existing app and presented it to leadership, tying each UX flaw back to a real-world risk, not just aesthetics. That gave us a north star for prioritization.

Why It Mattered:

• Faster Decision-Making: We reduced the time it took to log and update patients by 30–40% in critical use cases.
• Better Adoption in the Field: Medics actually wanted to use the app after we reworked it. A few even said it finally “got out of their way,” which was the goal.
• Support for Expansion: The success of the redesign played a role in continued funding and rollout across additional units and allied partners.
• Human Impact: At the end of the day, this wasn’t just about design—it was about making something that supported people doing incredibly difficult, important work. I treated every design decision like it could affect someone’s safety. Because it could.

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