Dynamic Health Learning Platform
How might we help medical professionals further develop their skills in an engaging way on an approachable and accessible platform?
Outcome
An e-learning platform with over 200 courses.
Role
Product designer
Creative lead
Medical illustrator
Tools
Articulate 360
Adobe Captivate
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Figma
Team Composition
Designers
Medical Illustrators
Nurses
Medical Writers
CONTEXT
The Problem
There are over 1,500 medical professionals working with our company and many more externally who want to further improve their skill set while also earning credit hours for their continuing education. Current products on the market offer either visually pleasing aesthetics but are low in interactive activities or are highly interactive but visually displeasing and inaccessible.
These are some extra notes and thoughts.
Clinicians viewed current competitors were either too childish in their visual design or lacking in interactivity.
IMPACT
The Goal
We set out to create a learning platform consisting of hundreds of courses that could serve thousands of medical professionals who wanted to earn trackable continuing education credits.
My suggestion to change our building platform increased our capabilities from building one course every few weeks to building out hundreds in a span of a few months!
RESPONSIBILITIES
My Contributions
I made the design decisions for this product and mentored other designers.
This included helping decide which tools to use that would fit within our budget, mentoring other designers in the creation of medical illustrations that follow our brand visual guidelines (which I helped implement at our company), creating an asset library with icons and medical illustrations for future use, creating modular course templates, and coordinating work on a cross-functional team.
I had two direct reports and worked with other designers as well. I was also juggling many other projects at the time.
RESEARCH
Initial Findings
To better understand current market offerings, I conducted a competitive analysis on the current state of products and interviewed user stakeholders. From this, I outlined our need to create:
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a sense of excitement for learning through interactivity
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memorable learning games
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a calming and dignified learning environment for stressed and tired medical professionals
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a responsive platform usable inside hospitals
Medical professionals were insulted by all the childish options on the market!
DESIGN
Beginning Iterations
At the beginning, I was tasked to use Adobe Captivate as this was software we previously had a license for. At this point, the team was both small and operating with a limited budget. This legacy software presented challenges with difficult-to-fix niche bugs.
The first iterations were made with basic interactive games for the sake of testing with nurses.
I literally learned Javascript to debug a Jeopardy game built in Captivate.
RESEARCH
Feedback and Insights
I gathered qualitative feedback after sharing this prototype with our users and found that:
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nurses were most likely to use this platform while in a hospital setting, so both a desktop and tablet format was needed
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they appreciated the mini-games because they offered pick-me-ups that helped them refresh their memory throughout the day
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they wanted more options to reset games so that they could further memorize through repetition
Nurses really know how to multitask!
DESIGN
Intermediary Iterations
Because of the limitations of Adobe Captivate, I called for us to shift our platform to Articulate 360. Articulate offered a better solution for an engineer-less team like us to create highly responsive products online for our users to more easily access our platform, and the software had more tools to make a larger variety of interactive games. Additionally, there was the added benefit of a lower learning curve and the ability to create courses modularly, which meant that more designers could be easily onboarded.
With this newer platform, I created themes that were within brand guidelines while creating new icon libraries and banners that would feel calm and safe to our users because one of the most common complaints about competitors was how unpleasantly "loud" their visual designs were.
I designed everything with future team members in mind. Every asset was meticulously organized and labeled, and I created course templates to be used down the line by future designers.
RESEARCH
More Testing and Feedback
I tried iterations of different activities and shared them with our section editors and nurses in an unmoderated setting. I learned that certain activities such as drag and drop and flashcards with vivid pictures were activities that helped boost their memory while also being simple enough to prevent frustration.
DESIGN
Final Iterations
Through the feedback gathered later on, we were able to make the activities more interactive and memorable in ways such as creating a wheel of fortune and chat games where the user could "speak" to a fellow medical professional while answering questions. These kinds of activities helped our users learn by offering bite-sized amounts of information and mental stimulation throughout what otherwise could have been long text-only medical courses.
Everything is fully responsive, even the games built into the platform! This enables medical professionals to learn while on-the-go!
IMPACT
What We Accomplished
By designing this product, we helped thousands of medical professionals achieve their continuing education goals on a learning platform that is visually and mentally pleasing to them. Because of my major push to switch platforms, we went from being able to create one unresponsive course on Adobe Captivate in several weeks to being able to create hundreds of responsive, interactive, and accessible courses on Articulate 360. With these changes and the modular courses I designed, this project was able to grow even further as it grew in popularity, and more members of the team were onboarded.
REFLECTION
My Thoughts
I am so proud of our small team for creating this e-learning product with a limited amount of resources. Through this project, I learned how to work closely with doctors and nurses. I also learned the value of getting detailed user feedback which helped us drastically transform the platform.
During the creation of this product, I was able to demonstrate my ability to plan for future members of my team, communicate my problem-solving skills, and show my leadership skills by making product-improving decisions that also positively impacted our users.
I built a lot of rapport with medical professionals at my company and gained a lot of trust from senior management on projects!