Reduce the mental slog of technology
Case managers are always catching up, and busy, crowded interfaces get in the way more often than they help.
How might we cut through the noise to what matters most?
Case Management,
re-imagined for nonprofits.
Giving caseworkers back their most limited resource — time with the people they serve.
Outcomes
Client intake and case assignment became 70% faster, so caseworkers spend more of their day with the people they serve and less of it on paperwork.
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50%
Less time spent on admin reporting
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87%
of Nonprofit Cloud customers report information is more centralized, easier to access and more transparent
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Patented
US patent granted for the case management method behind the design, US 11,782,943
70%
faster to complete a client intake and assign a case manager
50%
decrease in time spent on admin reporting
87%
of Nonprofit Cloud customers report information is more
centralized, easier to access and more transparent
My role
We built this product from the ground up over a year, from discovery research through GA in 2020, running bi-weekly iterative design sessions with participants and a three-phase customer pilot before launch.
What I owned
- Journey mapping — synthesized existing research into a shared view of user pain points
- Roadmap prioritization — partnered with the PM to sequence features against user needs and constraints
- Concept design and testing — designed early concepts and validated them with participants every two weeks
- Dev-ready design — delivered detailed screens, states, and specs, staying close to engineering through build
- Accessibility review — audited designs for a11y compliance before handoff
Aim
Nonprofits juggle several disconnected systems to track clients, so case managers lose hours hunting for records and doing admin instead of supporting people. Without one view of each client’s journey, it’s easy for someone to slip through the cracks.
What we learned
Current case management processes are stitched together and siloed. Case Managers often have to pivot throughout their day, but lose much of their time starting over from square one.
The client’s story is scattered
Email, docs, spreadsheets, SMS and paper each hold a piece. Nothing is centralized, so answers are slow and work gets duplicated.
Notes come after the moment
Case managers stay present with the client and capture details on phone or paper, entering them into Salesforce later.
“What needs me today?” is hard to answer
There’s no fast way to see which clients or deliverables are urgent, or to get up to speed before a session.
Workarounds fill the gaps
Improvised spreadsheets track service plans and action items because the system doesn’t connect progress to goals.
Plans belong to the client
Goals are client-defined and fluid, and the day isn’t 9 to 5. The tool has to follow shifting priorities, not lock them down.
The journey
Before designing screens, we mapped how a client actually moves through an organization’s programs — and where the case manager walks alongside them.
Case management is a constant stream of decisions, on and off the screen. Cut the unnecessary steps, anticipate needs before they’re voiced, and manage cognitive load with deliberate defocus and refocus.
Discovery calls with case managers and program managers mapped their days across two axes: digital engagement — time on devices — and human engagement, the time spent with clients and colleagues.
Design principles
Case managers are at their best in people-heavy moments, not data-heavy ones. Their days are full of decisions on and off the screen, so we framed the work around anticipatory design: cut unnecessary interactions, answer a need one step before it’s expressed, and manage cognitive load by letting attention defocus and refocus.
From the How might we statements, we defined four principles to carry that vision across the team and the product:
Simple
Case workers’ comfort with technology varies widely, and their real skill is engaging with people. A simple, guided experience means less time entering data and more time with clients.
Contextual
Everything centers on a case manager’s clients and caseload. Their dashboard paints a high-level picture of each client’s progress, then lets them drill into the specifics on that client’s profile.
Modular
Build components that are interoperable and customizable, so each organization can rearrange them to fit the way it works.
Moments of delight
Case work is demanding and often emotionally heavy. Small, sparing moments of delight, like celebrating a completed goal, encourage case workers and remind them of the impact they’re making on their clients.
Exploration to iterative design
Ideate, then validate — in short loops, with engineers and PMs in the room rather than at the end of a handoff.
Pilot testing
We put the product in front of real case managers, benchmarked it against what they were using, and turned what came back into a prioritized plan.
Benchmarking across the pilot
Scores from the UX scorecard captured in every participant session, compared with the current Salesforce experience.
Notes are the backbone of everything. Users capture client info, case plan updates, incidents and even tasks as notes, yet the current notes solution didn’t land, which makes it the highest-impact area to get right.
- Users track clients, not cases. The concept of cases didn’t come across, while case plans felt natural and solid, built on intake information with action items and services tied to each goal.
- Users need to see a client’s story over time. They get up to speed through appointment history and want a timeline of client activity, including what led up to an incident and what happens next.
- Work is shared, not solo. Every user wanted to assign tasks and appointments to multiple people, and they care most about client-related tasks rather than their personal to-dos.
- Users love key features but can’t find them. Everyone liked client search and would use the calendar view, but no one found search in its current placement or reached appointments through the nav, and they want to search by birth date, client ID, phone and email.
Flexibility is the top request across every area. Users want to customize case plans, notes, the client card and assessments to fit their organization, including skipping the wizard and adding their own fields and statuses.
- Notes are the core workflow, and services are a byproduct of them. Logging a service should be a lightweight step inside the note, with service types and multiple entries, so reporting needs are met without slowing down note-taking.
- Case plans are a record users rely on. They need goals and action items preserved, with statuses, history and a visible sense of progress, rather than deleted.
- Small usability gaps slow users down. Unclear tag creation, the “Add to records” label, notes that don’t filter to the current client, missing fuzzy search and an oversized client card all add friction to daily work.
- Different roles need different things. Program managers set up assessments and templates while case managers use them, and case managers also want to share work by assigning items and collaborating on notes.
Unclear labels cause confusion. Auto-named goals and action items, the Note ID, and the “Manage Service” label didn’t make sense to users, so they hesitated or couldn’t add a service to a note.
- Key actions are hard to find or don’t behave as expected. Service delivery, draft and save status were hidden below the fold, users looked for a save/complete button that wasn’t obvious, and they had to refresh the browser manually to see new data.
- Data entry needs more guidance and guardrails. Notes are so field-heavy that users miss important fields, and the assessments graph breaks when no date is entered, which points to required fields and a more guided, linear flow.
- Users need more flexible relationships between records. Case managers want to link records to a whole case plan or to a specific goal or action item, relate multiple clients to one incident, and build case plans that scale with flexible templates.
- Users want the information that matters surfaced clearly. They want deadlines and due dates front and center on the homepage, and assessment results they can filter by record type and scoring category, since categories aren’t directly comparable.
The solution
One connected system — from the first referral through to the outcomes a program reports on.
Home page
Start the day already oriented
A greeting, the week’s impact, and today’s events in one view. Attendance and follow-ups are counted out — sessions missed, clients due for a follow-up — alongside recent sessions, open tasks, and incidents that need attention now.
Client profile
The whole client on one record
Contact details, critical alerts, program engagements, the latest notes, and what’s overdue or coming next — all on one record. Enough to walk into an appointment prepared, or pick up a case you’ve never seen, without reading the whole history.
Client notes
Capture the interaction, not the paperwork
Notes are the heart of case management. Templates and tags do the structuring, drafts save as you go, and the note stays tied to the program engagement and service it belongs to — so writing it up takes minutes, not an evening.
Intake
A checklist that holds the process
Referral source, client information, family members, assessments, documents. The checklist tracks what’s done and what’s outstanding, with a stage bar across the top so anyone picking up the case knows exactly where it stopped.
Care plans
Assistive guidance, not blank pages
Templated action items are suggested against the goals already chosen, with instructions explaining when each applies. Select the ones that fit, write the ones that don’t — a personalized plan without starting from nothing.
Care plans
Goals, owners and progress in one plan
Personal, employment and housing goals grouped together, each with its action items, due dates, owners and completion state. One plan that reads the same to the case manager, the supervisor, and the client sitting across the table.
Icon design
I designed the Case Management and Program Management icons as one cohesive visual language with the heart at the centerpiece, representing case workers’ dedication to people’s well-being and program managers’ commitment to their teams and community impact.
Key takeaways
- Accessibility can’t be retrofitted. Building an inclusive product means designing for a11y from the start. Clear labels and plain language carry the most weight with users who aren’t especially tech savvy.
- Bring the whole team to the research. Having our scrum team listen in on customer calls aligned us faster than any writeup could. Hearing the frustration first-hand changed how engineers and PMs framed problems, and they started building from the user’s lens.
- Ideate, then validate. Interviewing participants and coming back to share concepts built trust, which opened the door to field visits — where what people did told us more than what they had said. Our design principles came out of those observations.
