Kristina Olsen
Healthcare UX & systems designer · Former medical librarian · D.Sc. student in information and interaction design
I designed and built Mothering Together, a postpartum AI companion. Elle labels every answer as “AI guidance” or “expert reviewed” and gets someone to crisis help in one tap. Grounded in card-sort research with mothers; MVP shipped in 19 days.
Read the 1-minute summary →Before product design, I spent nine years making complex information findable and accessible — first in a hospital library, then inside enterprise HR systems.
Built a hospital’s research repository from scratch: evaluated 13 platforms, designed the metadata schema and a taxonomy for 30+ specialties.
Read the case study →Centralized intake, triage, and status visibility so HRIS requests stopped disappearing into email and chat.
Read the case study →Automated sandbox demo-employee setup after every refresh — hours to minutes, with consistent data across four teams.
Read the case study →Reconfigured Org Studio modeling so HR partners and managers could plan structure changes with clearer guidance.
Read the case study →End-to-end referral flow across Recruiting, HCM, and Payroll — submit, track, and pay with status visibility.
Read the case study →Career profiles, campaigns, and feedback configured as a connected growth system instead of a compliance checklist.
Read the case study →Stripe, Zapier, Kit, and Notion wired into an eight-part automation system for member onboarding and client portals.
Read the case study →I started in a medical library, helping clinicians find research they could trust. Six years inside Workday for 1,500 people showed me what happens when systems don’t match how people think. That intersection — information, systems, and people — is still where I do my best work.
Now I design health information and the systems behind it, including Mothering Together, a postpartum companion I built myself. I’m also a first-year D.Sc. student in Information and Interaction Design at the University of Baltimore, studying how women navigate complex health systems and where design can close the gap.
Based in Northern Michigan. Outside of design, I coach high school cross country and read as much as I can.
Coaching high school cross country and track has clarified a lot of my thinking about design: what it actually means to meet people where they are, to give feedback that changes behavior, and to build for a range of abilities rather than the median case. Former NCAA D1 runner at UAB.
A newsletter about how work is designed — and who it’s designed for. The quiet structures that shape working lives, how decisions get made, and whose labor gets seen.
The prototyping arm of fwd design co. Where I build small apps, experiment with tools, and try things that don’t have a client attached yet.