Surgical Theater
Surgical Planning Platform
Year
2025
Discipline
Product Design, UX Research, Design Systems
Industry
Healthcare, MedTech
Overview
Surgical Theater is a healthcare technology company with a suite of products designed to assist surgeons in planning and performing complex cranial and spinal surgeries. Their platform uses CT scan data to generate 3D models, allowing surgical teams to plan procedures in augmented reality. A patient-facing component lets doctors walk families through the planned surgery using the same AR visualization, offering reassurance before high-stakes operations. The company has been a long-term client; this engagement focused on the last year of work to bring order and system to five years of accumulated design.
My Role
Strategy and Design Lead. Responsible for auditing and organizing five years of design files into a single source of truth, building a new AI-ready design system from a visual direction established by a previous designer, and applying that system across the full platform. Also led prototyping efforts and worked through a backlog of feature refinements and workflow improvements.
Problem
Five years of design work had accumulated without a unifying system. Screens had drifted over time, with small variations between versions, duplicate components, and no consistent spacing, typography, or component logic tying them together. The team had a new visual direction but no design system to support it, making future work difficult to build consistently or hand off reliably.
Solution
Conducted a full audit of existing screens going back five years, accounting for every feature and workflow that had been explored. Rebuilt and consolidated those screens under a new design system with proper variables, semantic component labels, and AI-ready structure built for scale. Repetitive components were merged, button styles and sizes were aligned, and Figma prototypes were built to give developers a clear, interactive reference for how each tool should behave in a surgeon's hands.
Outcome
Delivered a comprehensive prototype of the cranial surgery screens that developers used to build a working demo. The demo was necessary because the complexity of the workflows made standard Figma prototypes insufficient for realistic testing in a clinical context. The next step is to run the demo through testing with surgeons before moving into full development.
What I'm Proud Of
The complexity of this platform is significant. These are precision tools used by surgeons in high-stakes environments. Getting the interaction patterns right, modernizing the UX, and bringing five years of sprawling work into a coherent, scalable system without losing any of the functional depth is the kind of problem that is easy to underestimate and hard to execute well.
