Dani Nordin
Dani Nordin is an experienced Product Design leader and professional pot-stirrer who specializes in breaking down massive, complex problems and helping product teams figure out what to do about them. She currently serves as the Product Design Architect for our Clinicals EHR product, driving discovery and influencing roadmaps for major new product initiatives. Some of her recent projects have included making sense of how to get the data needed to support post-hospitalization follow up workflows, helping research and launch an Ambient Notes product, and research into Ambulatory Surgical Center documentation and reporting workflows.
Dani lives in Watertown MA with a husband, two kids, two dogs, and a handful of reptiles. She can often be found knitting, drinking coffee, ranting about liberal politics on Bluesky (@danigrrl) or occasionally doing standup comedy – often ALSO about liberal politics.
Presentations
UX Camp Spring 2025
Lessons Learned From Designing for AI Systems
This presentation focuses on practical tools and frameworks for designing AI experiences that users find genuinely helpful rather than frustrating. Drawing insights from various sources, including my work on a product that helps doctors generate clinical notes from their patient conversations, I’ll provide actionable strategies for designers and teams. By the end, you’ll have a toolkit to help you and your teams create safe, user-centered applications while identifying valuable opportunities for AI to address real-world needs effectively. Highlights include:
- Team exercises to help identify and de-risk promising AI projects
- Design and Research tips for different types of AI experiences
- Why most AI experiences are actually Very Much About the Interface, Thank You
- Critical things to keep in mind while working on AI projects
UX Camp Winter 2023
Practical Design Strategy: Creating a Human Centered Roadmap for Ambulatory Surgical Centers
Ambulatory Surgery Centers (ASCs) are a rapidly growing segment of the US healthcare ecosystem, enabling providers to perform same-day outpatient procedures in a safe and cost-effective environment outside the hospital setting. In 2018, ~5700 ASCs performed 23 million outpatient procedures and generated $35 billion in revenue. However, Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are clunky and ill-suited to the needs of these centers, causing many ASCs to turn to paper charts scanned into the EHR.
In 2021, a Product Lead and UX Lead were tasked to define a purpose-built ASC solution that enabled our clients to document surgical cases within the ASC, seamlessly sharing information between the patient’s surgical chart and their clinic chart. Through collaborative site visits, service blueprinting, and interviews, we:
- arrived at a clear human-centered vision and roadmap for the product
- coordinated across functions to align on strategy, scope, and resourcing
- prioritized and validated a list of near- and longer-term requirements
- built and socialized an investment case for resources
In this presentation, we will share the process we went through to arrive at a successful, human-centered product vision and roadmap. We will also share lessons learned, such as:
- How do you build and maintain effective, impactful partnerships between UX and Product while crafting strategy?
- How do you convey findings that engage an audience that ranges from C-level executives to sales professionals to scrum teams?
- How do you maintain a human-centered lens while discussing product tradeoffs and prioritizing investment?
- How do you stay in touch with the higher-level strategy while empowering the teams who have to take on the work to own the problem space?
Expect to leave the presentation with a few new tricks up your sleeve, some interesting lessons on stakeholder management, and a bit more information about surgery coordination than you thought you’d ever need.
Tent Talks Session: Your Brain & Your Next Job
On Tuesday, November 29th at 5:00pm Central, Dani Nordin joined us for a live Q&A session called “Your Brain & Your Next Job.”
UX Camp Fall 2020
Increase Your Design Influence By Understanding Your Organization’s Decision-making Style
As designers, we like to think of ourselves as makers. When we’re working on large, wicked problems, the challenge is that “making” is no longer a solo endeavor; it’s something that requires a lot of people and functionality to make happen. This can leave designers feeling like we’ve had to compromise our standards to appease business or development stakeholders. It also inadvertently creates an us-versus-them mentality that actually makes it less likely that we’ll be successful in moving forward our vision of what’s possible.
So what does this mean for us? Simply understanding what your product’s users are dealing with isn’t enough. To make truly great products, you need to understand how people, organizations, systems and content play together. In this presentation, we’ll focus on some ways to help understand the organizational context you’re working within, and to adjust your approach to increase your success within those organizations.
Leadership By Design 2020
Storytelling as a UX Leadership Superpower
We know that, as designers mature, they need to understand how to tell a story about their work. But how do you coach them in storytelling when stories can take so many forms depending on the phase of a project? In this presentation, Dani Nordin of athenahealth will share a framework she’s created to help designers at athenahealth craft a compelling story at various phases of a project—from design scenarios to research plans to portfolio case studies.
You’ll learn:
- The fundamental types of stories that tend to show up in our work;
- How the elements, attitude and altitude with which we shape our stories impact their effectiveness;
- Common pitfalls to avoid when crafting your story.
Along the way, you’ll laugh, cry and see some cute animal pictures.
