The Problem

Orbis Health had grown their patient management platform through a series of rapid feature additions over 18 months, responding to customer requests as quickly as their engineering team could ship. The result was a product that could do a lot but was increasingly difficult to navigate, with three different navigation patterns across different modules, inconsistent component behavior, and an information architecture that reflected the order features were built rather than how clinicians actually worked.

Support ticket volume was rising. Power users were building workarounds. A clinic network in the midwest had started evaluating competitors after two years as a customer, citing interface complexity as the primary concern.

"The product had become harder to use the more features we added. We knew that was wrong but we couldn't see how to fix it without breaking everything."

CPO, Orbis Health

There was also a compliance dimension. Healthcare interfaces carry specific regulatory requirements around error prevention and legibility. Several recent additions had been shipped without proper accessibility review, creating exposure the team was aware of but had not yet addressed.

The Solution

We began with a two-week observational research phase embedded with three different clinic teams, watching how staff moved through the product during actual patient interactions. The patterns that emerged were consistent across all three sites: users had developed personal navigation shortcuts that bypassed the intended flows, most of the newer features were invisible to anyone who had not been specifically trained on them, and the cognitive load during high-pressure moments was genuinely problematic.

Rather than a full redesign, we proposed a structured consolidation: rationalizing the navigation to a single model, unifying the component library, and reorganizing the information architecture around clinical workflows rather than product features. The visual changes were minimal by intent. The structural changes were significant.

"They showed us problems we had stopped seeing because we had gotten used to them."

Lead Product Designer, Orbis Health

Accessibility was addressed systematically by building a compliance checklist into the component library itself, so that future feature development would inherit correct behavior by default rather than requiring individual review.

The Result

Support tickets related to navigation and usability dropped by 41% in the three months following rollout. The at-risk clinic network renewed their contract before the new version had fully launched, citing the roadmap visibility as the deciding factor. Internal design velocity improved as the consolidated component library reduced the time spent on redundant decisions across feature teams.

The accessibility work resolved the existing compliance gaps and, more usefully, changed the team's internal process so that new features now go through accessibility review as a standard step rather than an afterthought.