Paperwork does not have to rule nurses' lives anymore.
NurseBackpack is a mobile app for nurses to manage their credentials in the palm of their hand instead of the paper binders. Nurse Backpack empowers nurses to take control over their careers by providing an easy way to store, manage, and share their credentials from their phones.
Role
Duration
Tools
Team
Project Overview
Nurse Backpack turns credential paperwork into something a nurse can manage in a few taps instead of a filing cabinet.
Problem
Nurses juggle dozens of certifications, licenses, and continuing-education requirements, each with its own renewal cycle and hospital-specific paperwork.
Before Nurse Backpack, this was tracked almost entirely on paper — binders, filing cabinets, and manual tracking by hospital HR or the nurse herself. A missed renewal deadline meant a nurse couldn't be staffed: costly for the hospital, stressful for the nurse. Blue Sky Staffing brought me on to design a mobile alternative to the binder.
Process
Research & Discovery
I interviewed nurses, staffing agents, and hospital nursing managers to understand how credentials were actually tracked day to day. The idea seemed so obvious that I assumed something like it already existed — but between those interviews, conversations at conferences, and online research, I could not find anyone who had come across an app that did this.
Early research and low-fidelity wireframes were completed in partnership with Steve Lomas while Blue Sky Staffing was still a client; I continued the work solo after being hired to take it through high-fidelity design and launch.
15
Nurses
5
Nurse Managers
7
Staffing Agents
Key Findings — 5 Pain Points
Skills checklists. Long, redundant paperwork repeated for every assignment and every skillset — store once, use many.
Hard copy requirements. Some hospitals still require paper (degrees, certs, fingerprints). The app includes secure electronic sharing with "what to do with this" instructions for the hospital, plus easy printing from the phone.
State regulations. Every state differs (an LPN can draw blood in most states but not Iowa; a nurse not certified as an LPN in one state may work — and get paid — as a CNA). We mapped Nursing Licensure Compact regulations to identify what position a nurse qualifies for, state by state.
Unique hospital protocols. Every hospital has its own rules. We built private journaling rather than competing with the Facebook groups nurses already use for peer-to-peer tips and warnings.
Memory prompts. Missing a renewal deadline means a nurse can't be staffed. The app provides notification options synced to calendar, including training facility locations (e.g., a fire station offering CPR validation).
Wireframing
We prototyped directly from interview themes, reviewed wireframes with engineering for feasibility and with the business for alignment, then tested with users to validate direction before moving to high fidelity.
Visual Design
Designed in Sketch, with InVision and Axure for prototyping. The brand goal: make something secure feel approachable. Testing led to a calm, understated color palette; Montserrat's geometric simplicity kept the interface legible on both phone and desktop.
Prototyping & Testing
17
Test Participants
2
Testing Rounds
98%
Task Success Rate
Experience highlights:
Senior Product Designer at Wilmington Trust (part of M&T Bank), designing complex employee-facing applications for collateral, custody, and security operations.
UX Lead for AllianceBernstein.
Designed and managed the release of Nurse Backpack — see case study →
Led project design for several startup accelerator cohorts at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center.
Taught the UI/UX Digital Product Design night class at Nashville Software School, and co-developed the FEWDD Bootcamp (Front End Web Design & Development) with Brenda Long.
My team designed the first cable TV app for iPad — not a streaming app, but a full replication of everything a cable box could do. It hit #1 on the App Store. There was no precedent to build from; we invented the interaction patterns as we went.
Final Design
The shipped MVP: cloud-backed storage, phone-camera document capture, calendar-synced renewal reminders, and an onboarding flow designed to compete with "I'll just keep using my binder."
Impact
★★★★★ Easy to use and convenient! No problems registering or inputting my documents. I like that I can easily manage my credentials since my HR rep doesn't always give me a lot of notice when I need to renew something. — Alissabean
Lessons Learned
Promoting the app meant getting in front of nurses directly — nursing conferences became both a marketing channel and an ongoing research pipeline, surfacing feedback from nurses, agents, hospital managers, faculty, and students.
Those same conversations surfaced interest from schools and hospitals in a non-paper credentialing solution for their own administrative side — the seed for the Enterprise version.
Nurses don't like yellow. Anything yellow is not good.
