Ready Rebound
Ready Rebound helps HR and Risk leaders manage injury recovery and return-to-work (RTW) operations with clearer visibility, stronger coordination, and defensible reporting. The work centered on turning messy, multi-stakeholder processes into actionable dashboards—without losing the nuance that makes the work actually work.
My role was to translate real workflows into a coherent system: defining the information architecture, dashboard structure, metric definitions, and component patterns that could scale across municipalities and stakeholders.
Role & Scope
- Role: Principal UX Strategist / Lead Designer
- Scope: Dashboard UX, design system alignment, research toolkit + workflow mapping
- Responsibilities: IA, research synthesis, metric definitions, component requirements, stakeholder alignment
- Partners: Product, Engineering, Data, HR, Risk, municipal leaders
- Outcomes: Clearer visibility across RTW lifecycle, improved reporting, reusable component strategy
Objectives
The goal wasn’t “a dashboard.” The goal was confidence: helping teams understand what’s happening, what to do next, and how to report outcomes in a way leadership can trust.
- Unify key RTW visibility across HR, Risk, Chiefs, and operational stakeholders
- Define defensible metrics (so engineering and data teams can ship the “right numbers”)
- Reduce manual reconciliation and spreadsheet dependency
- Create a scalable component system across RR and RTR dashboard variants
Constraints & Challenges
The environment combined operational complexity, sensitive data, and inconsistent inputs—across multiple municipalities with different policies and workflows.
- Different stakeholder needs (HR vs Risk vs Chiefs) pulling the product in different directions
- Data quality and consistency issues (what exists vs what’s needed)
- High expectation for accuracy and defensibility in reporting
- Design system modernization while supporting production constraints
Approach & Key Decisions
The work focused on making complexity legible. Instead of designing “screens,” we mapped workflows and decision moments, then built dashboards that match how leaders actually operate: triage, track, intervene, and report.
- Mapped HR + Risk workflows to identify decision points and visibility gaps
- Defined component-by-component metric and calculation requirements
- Created a reusable dashboard component strategy aligned to the new design system
- Built a handoff toolkit so the team could scale research + iteration without losing quality
Selected Screens & Components
Note: this page is intentionally high-level. Deeper case study detail and artifacts are available on request.
Outcomes & Impact
The result was a clearer operational picture: better visibility into caseloads and trends, fewer surprises, and a stronger ability to coordinate action across stakeholders.
- Improved cross-functional visibility and shared understanding of RTW status
- Clear metric definitions enabling engineering + data to implement accurately
- Reusable component patterns supporting future RR/RTR expansion
- Research + handoff assets enabling the team to continue confidently
Key Learnings
In operational systems, trust is the product. When the metrics are defensible and the workflow matches reality, adoption happens fast. When either breaks, nothing else matters.