Designing Interfaces for Clinical Environments
Designing wall-mounted and touchscreen lighting control interfaces for hospitals — where the user is a nurse mid-task, the room is dark, and a wrong tap has real consequences.
- Role
- Lead Product Experience Engineer
- Year
- 2019–2026
- Organisation
- Chromaviso A/S
Outcome
Interfaces deployed across hospitals, ICUs, operating theatres, and psychiatric wards throughout Denmark and internationally — refined through years of direct clinical observation and iterative testing.
Designing interfaces for clinical environments is a discipline that consumer UX practice doesn’t fully prepare you for. The constraints are different in kind, not just degree.
A nurse adjusting a patient’s lighting is doing it as a secondary task — their attention is on the patient. The interface has to work at arm’s length, with gloved hands, in a dim room, by someone who hasn’t thought about it since their training session six months ago. There is no “read the docs” moment. There is no undo.
The surfaces
Chromaviso’s product spans multiple physical and digital control points:
Wall-mounted controllers — physical devices that need to communicate lighting state and allow adjustment without requiring the user to look directly at them. Haptic feedback, icon legibility, and button layout are the design variables, not pixels and hover states.
Embedded touchscreens — installed in patient rooms and staff areas, running on constrained hardware. UI design here is closer to embedded systems design than web design. Frame rates, contrast ratios, and touch target sizes matter in ways that desktop UI design rarely demands.
Mobile and desktop configuration interfaces — used by biomedical engineers and facility managers to configure lighting scenes, schedules, and zone behaviour. Different users, different mental models, different tolerance for complexity.
How I worked
I didn’t design these interfaces from a studio. I spent time in the environments where they were used:
- Observing nursing workflows in somatic hospital wards to understand when and how lighting control fits into a shift
- Attending operations in surgical theatres to understand the extreme lighting requirements and zero-tolerance for distraction
- Visiting intensive care units where patients are sedated and light is a therapeutic tool, not just ambience
- Spending time in psychiatric departments where the relationship between light and patient state is acutely sensitive
- Talking to staff at nursing care homes where the users are older, less tech-familiar, and interact with the system many times a day
Each context produced specific design requirements that wouldn’t have been discoverable from a user survey or a usability lab session.
Key design principles that emerged
Forgiveness over flexibility — reducing the number of states a user can accidentally reach matters more than the number of states they can intentionally reach.
Ambient legibility — interfaces should communicate current state passively, without requiring an active check. A nurse walking past should be able to register lighting state without stopping.
Context-appropriate density — a configuration interface for a biomedical engineer can carry more complexity than a bedside controller. Matching information density to context and user is not a nice-to-have, it’s the primary design constraint.