Alpha Nodus
The first designer this company ever hired.
When I joined, there was no design team to join. Every screen had been built by developers making their best guess. My first job wasn't to design — it was to figure out what design even meant for this product.
01 · The Situation I Walked Into
Alpha Nodus builds Gravity, a workflow platform for imaging centers — Documents, Orders, Patients, Bookings, and Analytics, plus a patient-facing LinkApp. All of it already existed. None of it had been designed.
Screens had been assembled feature by feature, each one solving the ticket in front of it. The same action lived in three different places with three different labels. Staff worked around the product instead of through it, and nobody could say which flow was the intended one.
There was no design system, no shared vocabulary, and no precedent for what a designer was supposed to do here. I had to earn the role while doing it.
02 · What I Actually Changed
Sat with the actual workflow first — orders, intake, scheduling — before touching a single screen, so I could argue from evidence instead of taste.
Audited all five modules and mapped every duplicated pattern, inconsistent label, and dead-end state into one shared document the whole team could see. The appointment booking page was the clearest offender: eight sub-tabs crammed into a single long-scrolling screen, with no sense of where a task started or ended.
Built the first design system for the product: type scale, spacing, components, states — so new features stopped inventing themselves from scratch.
Redesigned the core modules one at a time, shipping alongside engineering rather than handing over a finished vision. Booking an appointment went from four to five steps down to two or three — same information, far less ceremony.
Rebuilt the billing estimate screen so patients could actually read it. Instead of one confusing number, deductions now break down the way an itemized receipt does — line by line, so people can see what they're paying for before they ask someone to explain it.
Designed a collapsible left-side panel for the way staff actually work: an iPad held in one hand between patients. Primary actions stay visible at all times, while secondary details — patient, provider, insurance — tuck into an expandable panel instead of pushing everything into a scroll.
Designed the patient-facing LinkApp with a different bar entirely: no training, no onboarding, no second attempt.
03 · What This Taught Me
Being the first designer is less about craft than about trust. Nobody is waiting for your Figma file — they're waiting to see whether your judgment is worth the delay it introduces.
I learned to argue in the language of the business: time, error rates, support load. A beautiful screen that can't be defended in those terms doesn't survive a sprint planning meeting.
I also learned patience. Systems change slowly in a product people already depend on, and the right move is usually the smallest one that makes the next move possible.
Mostly, I learned that design in a company without design isn't a discipline you apply — it's a habit you have to build in other people.
04 · Where It Stands
Design is now part of how Gravity gets built. Five core modules and the LinkApp share one system, new features start from patterns instead of guesses, and the work is ongoing — this one isn't finished, and that's the point.
Selected screens — placeholders