01 The brief
Halo's platform did everything it was supposed to and took a two-hour onboarding session to learn. In a ward at three in the morning, on a shared machine, by someone covering a shift, that is the same as not working.
Halo Health
A clinical tool a nurse can use at 3am, having never been trained on it.
Running right now
app.halohealth.example.com
In daily clinical use. The link opens the public marketing site.
· What it moved
-
- 0 %
Time on core task
Measured on ward, not in a lab
-
0 %
Unaided task completion
Up from 61%
-
0
Training sessions since
New staff get a login
-
AA
WCAG 2.2 conformance
Independently audited
02 What we did
We ran the redesign inside two hospitals rather than in the studio. Eleven observed sessions on real shifts, watching where people hesitated and what they wrote on sticky notes attached to monitors.
Almost everything came down to one thing: the interface asked users to remember state. Which patient, which form, which step. So we made state visible — a persistent context bar, one primary action per screen, and destructive actions that are undoable rather than confirmed.
The back end is Laravel and it stayed Laravel. This was not a rewrite; it was a rebuild of everything above the controller layer, shipped behind a flag ward by ward.
03 How it landed
Time on the core task dropped 44%. Task completion without help went to 96%. Halo have not run a training session since — new staff are handed a login instead.
· The work
What it actually looks like.
· How it ran
Start to live, in order.
The whole thing took 14 weeks, with Halo in the room for every phase.
-
Weeks 1–3
On the ward
Eleven observed sessions across two hospitals, on real shifts including nights.
-
Weeks 4–6
Architecture
Rebuilt the information architecture around making state visible.
-
Weeks 6–12
Design & build
Screen by screen, behind a feature flag, with clinicians reviewing weekly.
-
Weeks 13–14
Rollout
Ward by ward, with the old interface one click away for a month.
What Halo said
Rare to find a studio that is this strong on both design and engineering. No translation loss between the two.
· Still running
Go and use it yourself.
In daily clinical use. The link opens the public marketing site.
Next project
Prism Studio
· More work
Other things we shipped.
Same studio, same thread, different problem.