Noelle A Moncibaiz
Managing a disease outbreak is already complex. The software shouldn't make it harder.
Epidemiologists work across dense, high-stakes records, lab results, case histories, jurisdictional requirements — where missing the wrong detail has real consequences. The legacy system technically held all of it. Finding what mattered inside it was the problem.This case study covers how we rebuilt that experience around clarity, not just capability.
Role
UX Designer
Focus
Public Health Data Systems
Process
Discover → Define → Design → Validate
01 THE CHALLENGE
NBS is a CDC-integrated information system that helps local, state, and territorial public health departments manage reportable disease data and report notifiable diseases to the CDC. It's the backbone epidemiologists rely on when speed and accuracy both matter.
My first objective wasn't to redesign the interface, it was to understand how epidemiologists actually worked inside it, and where it was working against them.
02 UNDERSTANDING THE USER
I observed how epidemiologists and public health staff actually moved through a case day to day, rather than how the system assumed they would, all conducted remotely, through screen-shares and virtual sessions rather than in-person shadowing. That meant watching ELR (Electronic Laboratory Reporting) specialists reconcile lab data in real time, seeing where they left NBS entirely to complete a task elsewhere, and tracking where manual cleanup quietly ate their time.
The clearest finding: the system wasn't missing functionality. It was failing to help users find the functionality they already had.
03 THE KEY INSIGHT
"The problem wasn't a lack of functionality. It was finding what mattered."
01
Everything was surfaced with equal visual weight, so nothing stood out as urgent.
02
Years of jurisdiction-specific customization had no shared structure holding it together.
03
Some tasks required leaving NBS for third-party tools; others required manual cleanup NBS should have handled itself.
04 DESIGNING THE EXPERIENCE
Four screens, four different UX problems, each one central to how epidemiologists get through a day.
Home Dashboard
Surfacing priorities instead of everything at once
The redesigned home screen gives users an immediate read on their workload, what needs action versus what's simply informational, replacing a landing view that treated every item the same.
Patient Profile
Organizing dense case data into a scannable hierarchy
Patient, investigation, and document information previously competed for the same visual space. The redesign groups related data and establishes a clear reading order, so users spend less time hunting and more time deciding.
Patient Merge
Making a high-consequence decision easier to trust
Merging records is high-stakes, getting it wrong means bad data downstream. The redesigned merge flow puts conflicting fields side by side, so users can confidently compare and confirm rather than guess.
Page builder
Flexibility for jurisdictions, without fragmenting the product
Different jurisdictions need different disease-specific forms and fields. Page Builder lets each one configure what it needs natively, replacing the third-party workarounds teams previously relied on, without splintering the core experience.
05 REFLECTIONS
This project reinforced that simplifying a complex enterprise system rarely means removing capability — it means giving structure to what's already there, so the right thing is easy to find at the moment it matters most.