Semo
Role
UI/UX Designer
Scope
Experience Design
Design Research
Client / Year
Greydient Lab / 2024
Problem space
In 2024, NTUC Health launched a public open pitch to identify a vendor design partner for a new senior care initiative. Rising to the challenge, our team conceptualized Semo - a dual-sided platform designed to revolutionize senior living and healthcare operations.
On the operational side, it features a robust care management dashboard to help senior home healthcare workers optimize Activities of Daily Living (ADL) tasks and workflows. Used internally by nurses, the product includes monitoring tools for patient triaging, daily vitals tracking, treatment plans, and clinical notes, alongside built-in productivity and communication features.
As an extension to the original pitch, we also created a consumer-facing platform. Solving the historically fragmented search process for senior care, this one-stop digital platform empowers seniors to independently browse, compare, and book various senior living, rehabilitation, and respite care options.
Leveraging my previous work experience in the healthcare industry, I joined the design team in turning this initial ideation into a high-fidelity pitch. Our comprehensive concept stood out, successfully earning us a shortlist spot and a face-to-face presentation with NTUC Health stakeholders.
My role in this concept design was on experience design and design research.
Research
To ensure the dashboard solved real operational challenges, we began by interviewing nurses across varying levels of seniority from both hospital and senior care environments. Our goal was to map their day-to-day workflows, understand the nuances between high-paced hospital procedures and residential care habits, and pinpoint the exact bottlenecks where our digital product could intervene.
This research directly informed the platform's system architecture. To ensure the digital workspace safely mirrored the physical clinical hierarchy, we established a Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) system with four distinct profiles: Super Admin, Nurse Manager, Senior Staff Nurse, and Staff Nurse. Each tier is equipped with specific viewing permissions and administrative override rights tailored to their real-world clinical authority.
Operational Solution
To reduce cognitive load and administrative overhead for healthcare workers, the Semo dashboard was designed as a centralized hub for productivity and communication. By automating routine operations and surfacing critical data when it matters most, the platform empowers nurses to spend less time managing logistics and more time delivering high-quality patient care.
Key Features and Solutions
Automated Vitals Monitoring & Smart Alerts
The dashboard tracks all patient vitals and visualizes historical trend readings. To proactively prevent medical emergencies, the system automatically triggers alerts if it detects a sharp decline in patient data, utilizing customizable thresholds that can be adjusted by nurses or set to default facility guidelines.
Centralized Patient Itineraries
Nurses can view a comprehensive timeline of every resident's upcoming day at a glance. By consolidating recreational activities, physiotherapy sessions, scheduled family visits or any other related resident activities into one consolidated calendar view, nurses no longer have to dig through dense clinical notes to understand a patient's daily flow even if the patient was previously not under their direct care.
Predictive Task Management
To ensure critical steps in a treatment plan are never missed in a fast-paced environment, a dedicated "next-action" interface actively prompts nurses with their immediate upcoming tasks and pending care duties.
Smart Profiling & Automated Rostering
The platform streamlines day-to-day staffing by capturing nurse expertise during onboarding. Using this smart profiling, senior nurses in charge receive automated roster suggestions that intelligently match staff to specific patients based on medical needs and required seniority levels.
Connected Resident Companion App
Bridging the gap between care providers and patients, we designed a companion mobile interface for tech-savvy seniors. This empowers residents to take control of their own experience by checking their schedules, submitting meal preferences, signing up for activities, and coordinating visits with loved ones directly through the app.
User Validation
To ensure our designs genuinely solved the bottlenecks we initially uncovered, we closed the research loop by bringing back the same nurses to test the high-fidelity prototype. We validated the product concept through a moderated, mixed-method study, observing the nurses as they navigated task-oriented flows while gathering in-depth qualitative feedback.
Testing the dashboard directly with our initial research cohort not only proved the viability of our operational workflows but also generated crucial insights to refine the final user experience ahead of the NTUC Health pitch.
Consumer Solution
To solve the historically fragmented and opaque process of finding senior care, we designed the consumer side of Semo to function like a modern hospitality booking platform. Rather than relying on outdated brochures or agency middlemen, this aggregator empowers seniors to independently browse, compare, and book their preferred care facilities or temporary stays on their own terms.
Key Features and Solutions
Resident-Centric Facility Listings
Historically, crucial lifestyle details about care homes are rarely stated publicly. To bridge this gap, every listing provides granular transparency into what seniors actually care about. This includes specific amenities (e.g., therapeutic gardens for dementia care, quiet rooms, rehabilitation centers, and single vs. shared rooms), specific medical services (palliative, day, or respite care), and daily lifestyle programs (group knitting, occupational therapy, and strength training) as an example. All this information should be readily available without the need for next-of-kins or the seniors themselves to request for from the senior care facilities.
Personalized Subsidy & Financial Transparency
Navigating healthcare costs is a major pain point. We integrated a dynamic financial feature that calculates and displays available government schemes and subsidy support tailored specifically to the user’s personal profile, ensuring complete cost transparency upfront. These are maintained collaboratively with facility managers and the Semo team to ensure accuracy and transparency.
Verified, Immersive Visual Galleries
To build trust and provide a premium browsing experience, we designed an expansive, high-quality photo gallery for every listing. Mimicking top-tier travel platforms, these live photos are strictly verified by the Semo team and maintained by facility managers, guaranteeing that seniors have an accurate, authentic view of their future living spaces before booking. This practice removes the need for families to physically tour the facility as it takes time and resource to do so.
Reflection
While Semo began as a concept design, preparing it for a high-stakes government pitch grounded the entire process in real-world business objectives. This project fundamentally expanded my UX toolkit, challenging me to step beyond surface-level UI and conduct rigorous, real-world research. The most rewarding aspect was learning how to synthesize complex user behaviors from the daily routines of nurses to the emotional needs of seniors, and translate those deep research insights into highly actionable product features.
I am immensely grateful to my mentors and colleagues for entrusting me with this opportunity, and for guiding my growth as we shaped this product for the NTUC Health pitch.
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