E-learning at DeckerMed
OVERVIEW
DeckerMed is a digital medical publishing and e-learning platform with life-long learning as a focus.
Their main offerings to medical schools is a subscription based e-learning platform for residency students and their program directors.
ROLE
Product Designer
User Research, Interaction design,
Prototyping & Testing.
January 2017-2019
Background
Originally a traditional print publishing company based in Toronto, DeckerMed has evolved into a world-class e-learning platform with a life-long learning focus. Today, DeckerMed e-Learning Platform serves thousands of students, residents, educators, healthcare practitioners, premier hospitals and medical schools such as Harvard, Yale, Cleveland Clinic, Tenent Health, John Hopkins School of Medicine, HCA, McMaster and more!
I was half the design team at DeckerMed at the start.
When I came on as one of two designers among 16 developers and 3 product managers, we were tasked with brainstorming and designing features and products. At the same time we divided our time to internal optimization and solutions for automating manual tasks. Once we had established an efficient design process I grew the design team to better cover the scope of future projects.
During my time there I grew tremendously and took ownership of the design process. Some of my accomplishments include:
Implemented a design process. This has helped our team establish more structure to how we conduct our work and allow other teams to gain visibility across our upcoming sprints.
Establishing a design system. This has helped to maintain consistency in the look and feel across different parts of the platform, creating an evolving system that created efficiency and room for growth. This has also helped the Engineering and Product teams to understand how and why we choose to implement certain components over others.
Creating new features through an iterative, user-centered approach to focus on the most critical needs of the system and user.
Methodology
Based on the user-centered design and design thinking, integrating design strategies with Agile scrum sprints allowed the entire team to take ownership of the creative process and focus on user needs while simultaneously increasing productivity. The main design thinking phases are: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototyping and Testing. Their were many advantages of incorporating the Prototyping and Testing phases into the scrum, it allows all team members to be stakeholders in the design creation, allowed for new discoveries and reiterated the user goals in every phase of development
Guidelines are quick updates that allow residents to read just the important content pertaining to their specialty. Redesigned tables and ability for offline viewing were key focuses on this page
The weekly curriculum is the lifeline of the product. It schedules residents’ academic year into weekly readings, tests and assignments. Similarly the Program director has to monitor their residents in order to remediate or remind them to stay on track.
The Resident and PD Logbooks glimpses an overview into their progress and areas of weakness. Automated test creation of wrong answers and quick links to intuitive actions allows both direct manipulation and background remediation.
Design Process
At DeckerMed, we focused a lot on documentation and iteration. Especially in the beginning, it's important to iterate. The first thing you draw is never the best solution! By constantly workshopping and returning to the data collected by users and internal stakeholders we were able to create many features and products.
The heart of the DeckerMed platform is the reviews published. From a review learning objectives, test questions, slides and abbreviated texts can be parsed. There goal was to allow residents to customize their reading experience. They could create custom notes and slides, jump to updated guidelines or just view teacher shared notes to optimize their learning experience.
Tracking Learning Objectives will now appear as correct, incorrect or incomplete in your progress bar, as well as quick link to test associated with the reading
Reading Page
Personal Smart Scrollbar with reading tools. Toolbar links are color coordinated to let you navigate to the content that you need
Guideline Updates
Weekly Curriculum™ Landing
Logbooks
Connecting people and collaboration - recently updated with the ability for chief residents and faculty to share notes with residents for insight into critical areas of study