Lantum app iOS & Android
Lantum is a workforce management platform for healthcare. It helps schedule and manage clinical staff, and helps clinicians find work. I joined Lantum just as they raised Series B, which was used to move into the Secondary Market. Previously we'd operated solely in Primary Care.
I lead most aspects of design at Lantum, but this post is specifically about our mobile app for clinicians. It's job was to help them manage their shifts, book leave, and pick up extra shifts when they needed to.
Interface
I've written about the technical structure and challenges down below so you don't have to read through the whole thing if you're not interested in that.
There's a large degree of heirarchy to how Lantum is laid out. Not all options are of equal importance and we know from reems of data (and a lot of talking to folks) that there are a few actions that are repeatedly daily/weekly, and some that are f set once and forgotten about. Product companies can fall into the trap of trying to make sure 'everything is accessible' which is admirable but not always the best way to go about it.
The main functions revolve of Lantum revolve around the clinicians schedule, in particular: Viewing the schedule, manipulating the schedule (e.g swapping shifts), or adding to the schedule (e.g finding new work).
These functions live, naturally, on the bottom navigation menu. Each main screen is presented visually the same way, with a title heading and the content on a sheet-like overlay. These distiguish them from the rest of the app, connecting these core functions together, as well as providing reusability of templates and caching of data in places.
Although we didn't have an official 'design system', our components were built on a library we called DNA. This was a collection of components that were used across the app, and were built to be as flexible as possible. This was a great way to ensure consistency across the app, and also to make sure we were building things in a way that was scalable and maintainable.
You can a sample Figma file of that here.
Shifts
See who's working
Besides seeing your own schedule, one of the most important things for a clinician is to see who they're working with. No schedule is created in a vacuum, and how other people are scheduled can have a big impact on your own schedule.
Besides, we consistently heard from users that seeing the entire schedule helped them both mentally and practically prepare for their day. They could find who the senior registrar was, or see if they were working with someone they knew. It also helped with swapping shifts, which we'll talk more about later.
When speaking with early adopters of the app, this came up again and again. So I decided to throw together a quick prototype to see how it would work. Clincians were originally asking to see the full rota, just like they did on a spreadsheet. However, when we looked into this - it was extremely inefficent for answering the questions that had when looking at it.
For example, One guy we spoke to Mo used to check the rota after it came out to see if there was a good balance of night shifts between the group. He'd been burnt before on previous rotations and never bought it up. So now he'd always check to see if there we any patterns that looked off.
Doing this on a spreadsheet took him close to an hour.
This lead me down the path of looking at displaying this data a different way.