Digitizing Respirator Fit Testing

The Problem

Every day, millions of people across the United States — healthcare workers, first responders, lab researchers — rely on respiratory protection to stay safe on the job. Behind the scenes, keeping those workers protected takes coordination, compliance, and a lot of testing.

At Risk and Safety Solutions, we built B2B software alongside the safety professionals who do this work. The Respirator Fit Test application came out of a need at UCSF's Respiratory Protection Program: the people running fit testing were managing the entire process on paper forms. A session could run one to three participants at a time, and after each one, the Industrial Hygienist sat down and manually entered everything from paper into his desktop. The work was getting done twice, every time — and tracking a participant's status across forms was fragmented at best.

Insights

The testing site sat nearly two hours from our office, so every visit had to count. I interviewed the Occupational Safety and Industrial Hygienist who ran the program, and paired those conversations with contextual inquiry — sitting in on fit test sessions to watch how they actually unfolded, not how the forms said they should.

The goal was to map the workflow end to end and find where digitizing would make a real difference for the people running the program — not just put the same paper form on a screen. Three things kept surfacing:

Scheduling was its own job. Appointments, reminders, and walk-ins all lived outside the paper process. Employees often wanted to squeeze a fit test into a lunch break, and there was no easy way to fold them into the day's schedule. Any digital solution had to treat scheduling as a first-class part of the workflow, not an afterthought.

Paper forms meant doing the work twice. Every session ended with manual re-entry into the desktop. That double entry cost time, invited errors, and made participant status fragmented across forms.

Admins had no line of sight on the program. With testing happening across three campuses, administrators had no high-level view of engagement, respirator trends, or compliance status. The data existed — it just lived on paper where nobody could act on it. Metrics needed a home of their own.

Who I was designing for

People came to the portal from different points of need, and the design had to hold all three:

• EH&S professionals — program oversight, reporting, and compliance tracking.
• Occupational Safety and Industrial Hygienists — running the sessions: verifying identity, conducting the test, logging results, determining best-fit respirators.
• Fit test participants — getting in, getting tested, and getting back to work: scheduling, pre-test requirements (facial hair compliance included), and checking their own status.

The Solution

I started with the information architecture and low-fi concepts for the primary use cases. Once the product manager, architects, developers, and stakeholders gave the go-ahead, we moved into usability testing with mid-fi prototypes — ideas were tested through paper sketches, wireframes, and clickable prototypes before anything reached development, which surfaced usability issues early and kept the designs honest to how sessions actually run.

The RSS Fit Test application brings the whole workflow into one place: managing forms, scheduling appointments, and monitoring ongoing metrics, from check-in to reporting.

The fit test, digitized end to end

Testing administrators manage active fit test sessions, log results, verify participant information, and determine appropriate respirator fit — during the session, not after it.

Walk-ons, welcome

Got a walk-on? Employees often want to squeeze in a fit test during their lunch break. No problem: with integrated people-search, Industrial Hygienists can look up anyone in the database and see the impromptu session through from start to finish.

Records that keep themselves

Each participant carries a respirator record: which respirators they're cleared for, fit test results, and expiration dates. What used to be fragmented across paper forms became a status you can look up.

Metrics with a home of their own

For the admins with packed schedules, the dashboard surfaces program engagement, respirator trends, and compliance insights across all three campuses — the high-level view that simply didn't exist when the data lived on paper.

The Outcome

UCSF switched over. The Industrial Hygienist who used to end every session with a stack of paper and a desktop to re-enter it into now runs the program in the application — and it stuck. Since implementation, the team has been exploring integration possibilities with SimplyBook, their scheduling tool, to fold booking even deeper into the workflow.

A clearly defined MVP kept the project focused and on time even as requests expanded — including opportunities to adapt the system for other UC programs.

Learnings

Design for operational realities. A fit testing program isn't an ideal user flow — it's limited administrator capacity, compliance requirements, and three campuses to coordinate. The solutions had to hold up in fast-paced testing environments and still make sense to a participant seeing the portal for the first time. Product decisions had to be grounded in the operational context, not just the happy path.

Seek feedback early, and keep seeking it. With the site two hours away, in-person collaboration was scarce — so early stakeholder feedback became essential. Testing through paper sketches, low-fi wireframes, and clickable prototypes surfaced usability issues sooner, cut rework, and kept the designs aligned with how sessions actually run.

Prioritize for an effective MVP. Requests kept expanding — including adapting the system for other UC programs — and a clearly defined MVP is what kept us focused. Prioritizing core user needs let the team deliver on time while leaving room to scale later.