Omnicell LASA
Red and green.
In a hospital.
Nobody asked if that was safe.
Accessibility wasn't a business requirement — there was no ticket, no spec line. Design brought colorblindness expertise to the table because nobody else was going to. What started as a contrast audit turned out to be a safety gap nobody had named.
Look alike. Sound alike. Store them apart.
LASA · FDA-maintained list · Dispensing stage
LASA stands for look-alike, sound-alike. Medications that are visually similar, have similar names, or are easily confused at the point of care. The FDA maintains a list. Hospitals have protocols at every stage of the medication lifecycle — from prescribing all the way through administration.
Our piece of it was the dispensing stage. Specifically bin assignment. The failure chain starts here and it's entirely preventable — but only if the system makes adjacency risk visible at the moment of placement.
The FDA maintains a LASA drug list. Hospitals take it seriously at every stage — prescribing, dispensing, administration. Our piece was dispensing.
The screen gave them nothing.
Original bin assignment screen · No grid · No LASA flag · No adjacency awareness
The original bin assignment screen asked the tech to open the drawer, look at the physical bins, decide where a new medication should go, and then type a number. That was the whole interaction.
No grid. No map of the drawer. No indication of what was already stored nearby. The system had no concept of adjacency and no concept of LASA risk. You could type bin 21 and have no idea that bin 22 already held a look-alike medication with a similar name and identical packaging.
This wasn't a UX gap. This was a safety gap. And nobody had named it yet.
The tech looked at the drawer, picked a number, and typed it in blind. No grid. No LASA flag. No way to know what was next door.
We had a grid. It still wasn't safe.
Color only → color blindness → clinical color conventions
When we got to the grid the first instinct was to make it feel intuitive. Red means stop. Green means go. Everyone knows that.
Except in a hospital they don't mean what you think they mean. In clinical and industrial design environments, color carries established safety conventions completely different from what a software product team assumes. Red on a medical device means danger — not "bin is occupied." Green doesn't mean safe to use — it means the system is running normally.
We were importing traffic light logic into a clinical context and nobody had stopped to ask whether that translation was valid.
The grid told them which bins were occupied. It told 8% of users nothing at all.
8% of men cannot distinguish red from green. The grid told them nothing useful.
Color. Shape. Icon. All three.
Multi-channel communication · Drawer selection · Hardware sync
The answer wasn't better colors. It was to stop relying on color alone. Every bin now communicates through three channels simultaneously — color, shape, and icon. If one channel fails, two more carry the signal.
The flow is two steps now. You choose a drawer first. The system shows you the full cabinet — which drawers have available space, which are locked, which are recommended with no LASA risk. Then you open the drawer and choose a bin.
That drawer selection step didn't exist before. In the legacy system you were already inside a specific drawer with no way to compare options. Now the system is doing that work before you even open anything.
And the screen and the physical drawer are finally synchronized. When you select a bin on screen, the light in that drawer responds. The screen and the hardware are saying the same thing at the same time. That connection didn't exist before.
Step 1 — Choose a drawer. The system does the comparison work before you open anything.
Step 2 — Choose a bin. Three channels at once. If one fails, two more carry the signal.
What I'd do differently.
This story is unusual in that it wasn't assigned — it was something design brought to the table because nobody else was going to. That's both the thing I'm most proud of and the thing I'd do differently.