Product Design
2026
ShiftWatch
Concept
Role
Product Designer
Year
2026
Context
Concept project
About
A desktop B2B SaaS module that helps ICU nurses manage patient alerts during a shift and hand over care safely at the end of one.
Problem
ICU nurses receive up to 350 alerts per patient per day. Between 85 and 99 percent are non-actionable. The result is alert fatigue, nurses learn to dismiss quickly, and occasionally miss the ones that matter.

At shift end, patient context is transferred verbally and through handwritten notes. Critical information gets missed. The incoming nurse starts her shift with an incomplete picture.

ShiftWatch addresses both problems, not as separate features, but as two expressions of the same need: a nurse who always knows what's happening, and can transfer that knowledge without loss.
350
alerts per patient, per day
Up to 15% require clinical action. The rest are noise.
User
Sarah, ICU nurse
Sarah doesn't interact with the product in isolation. She monitors two critically ill patients while moving between bedside care, alarms, colleagues and documentation — across a 12-hour shift, constantly interrupted.
THE CONSTRAINTS
02
patients
Sarah is simultaneously responsible for two patients, each generating a different stream of alerts.
12h
shift
The interface needs to support repeated monitoring and decision-making over a long, demanding shift.
Constant
interruptions
Sarah's attention is frequently pulled away by alarms, colleagues and bedside needs.
20m
handover
At the end of the shift, critical patient information must be transferred quickly and reliably.
Principles
Persistent context
Patient information stays visible at all times. Sarah should never have to navigate back to the top to reorient after an interruption.
Persistent patient header on all detail views
Fast recovery
Every interaction is completable in seconds and resumable after interruption. No action requires sustained attention to complete safely.
Collapsible handover drawer, preserved state
Scannable information
Critical status is encoded visually before text is read. The severity bar, colour, and icon communicate urgency at peripheral vision distance.
3px severity bar, pre-attentive encoding
Structured handover
Handover notes are pre-populated from shift data. Sarah reviews and edits rather than writes from scratch under end-of-shift fatigue.
Notes tab, auto-generated key events
Design Decisions
01
purple is the brand color
The first intuitive thought was to choose blue or teal as a brand color; both feel clinical and trustworthy. However, in a clinical interface, colour carries strict semantic meaning. Green means stable. Red means critical. Amber means warning. Blue means informational.
‍
Choosing purple solves this problem directly. It's the one colour in the standard semantic palette with no inherent clinical meaning, which means it can own the brand layer without creating false urgency signals.
02
de-emphasise, don't hide
The standard filter behaviour is to hide non-matching items. On a dashboard with 20+ rows that makes sense,  it reduces cognitive load. With two patients it does the opposite. Filtering to "Critical" and hiding the warning patient card removes a person from Sarah's field of view. In a clinical monitoring context, that's not a UX preference — it's a patient safety risk.

The decision was to de-emphasise non-matching cards instead: reducing them to 35–40% opacity so they recede without disappearing.
03
Active and acknowledged are independent states
Most notification systems treat acknowledgement as a form of resolution. You acknowledge something, it moves to a done state, it stops demanding attention. That logic is wrong in a clinical context.An ICU nurse acknowledging a critical SpO2 alert doesn't mean the SpO2 has normalised, it means she's registered the problem and taken responsibility for monitoring it. The alert is still active. The condition is still present.
04
Alert markers on vital sign graphs
A SpO2 value of 91% tells you where a patient is. A SpO2 graph shows you where they're going. But even a graph doesn't tell you the full story without one more layer: when did the alert fire relative to the trend?SpO2 at 91% on a recovering trend is a different clinical situation from SpO2 at 91% on a declining trend that fired an alert 25 minutes ago and is still falling.

Correlating alert events directly onto the vital sign timeline, a red dot at the exact moment of threshold crossing, with the value and timestamp annotated turns a monitoring graph into a clinical narrative.
05
Drawer over dedicated mode for handover
The initial design for handover was a dedicated full-screen mode: a clean, focused workspace for the most important 20 minutes of the shift. The problem emerged when I considered what happens if a critical alert fires mid-handover.

A full-screen mode blocks everything behind it. The drawer solves it: collapsible without losing state, with both patient cards still visible and interactive behind it. Sarah can pause, act, return. The handover and the monitoring happen in the same space.
06
Handover notes are pre-filled, not blank
At the end of a 12-hour shift, Sarah is cognitively fatigued. Asking her to write a handover summary from scratch at that moment is both a documentation burden and a patient safety risk, tired people miss things.

The handover notes are pre-populated from shift data. The current status summary pulls from the patient's active vital state. Key events are auto-generated from the alert history,  every alert that fired, resolved, and how. Active alerts and pending tasks are pulled live. Sarah reviews and edits rather than writes from scratch. The product reduces the cognitive load at exactly the moment it's highest.
Prototype. Flow 1
Prototype. Flow 2
The other side of the handover
When the incoming nurse logs in to start her shift, she's presented with Sarah's handover before seeing the dashboard.
ShiftWatch is one piece of a larger clinical platform. The next step is the charge nurse module, the unit-wide view that connects individual nurse workspaces into a coordinated team, and eventually the doctor-facing interface that sits alongside it.
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2026 Mayya Gubeladze