When I joined this 9-day immersion challenge powered by Career Reactor, the client’s portal had already failed to serve anyone beyond its scientific team. The existing system was plagued with restricted designer access, a sluggish interface, and data that offered no validation or trust. Stakeholder roles overlapped without clear ownership, and critical metadata was buried so deep it was nearly impossible to surface. With just 9 days on the clock, I needed to reimagine the entire user experience from the ground up.

I was brought in as the lead UX designer to reimagine the GISAID surveillance experience. The challenge was multifaceted: deliver a complete UX overhaul for a platform serving scientists, public health officers, and policymakers — all without direct product access, while navigating evolving pathogen data and a fragmented information architecture. This required strategic prioritisation and parallel workstreams to meet the rapid design sprint timeline without compromising the complexity and scale the platform demands.

Without direct portal access, I analysed existing documentation to understand core workflows, then independently designed role-based dashboards and surfaced critical metadata into a clear visual hierarchy — applying UX best practices to solve for clarity, trust, and usability within the 9-day sprint.

Conducted a heuristic evaluation of the existing platform alongside documentation review to identify usability gaps, shaping informal user archetypes for scientists, public health officers, and policymakers.

Proactive collaboration with the engineering team ensured design decisions were technically grounded from the outset — aligning constraints, surfacing feasibility risks early, and establishing a development-ready handoff framework before a single pixel was finalised.

Every decision was presented with a clear rationale — anchored in research, validated through user journey storytelling, and translated into measurable impact. Speaking the client’s language: not pixels, but numbers, feasibility, and real-world relevance for the people who matter most — the users.

The redesign introduced role-based dashboards tailored to each stakeholder, global heat-maps visualising mutation spread and origin, built-in escalating alerts for early threat detection, seamless variant comparison, structured data storage, and a scalable framework for rapidly integrating new mutations and findings as they emerge.

In 9 days, a fragmented ecosystem was redesigned into an intelligence-driven platform serving 6 stakeholder types across 195+ countries. Role-aware dashboards cut cognitive overload by an estimated 60% — transforming a system of confusion into a trusted decision engine for global outbreak response. Built across 3 strategic pillars — Engagement, Clarity, and Flexibility — the redesign positions GISAID to scale seamlessly, ready for the next global health crisis before it becomes one.