The American Medical Association
Business Unit Showcase Site
The Medical Student Outreach team requested a digital product the medical student outreach team could use for two of their events, the poster showcase and the larger research challenge.
My role
Visual & UX Designer II
Team
Other UX designers: J. Pencak, A.O’Flinn; Product Manager: D. Mouserak; Developers: C. Harder, J. Thorne, A. Martinez, K. Graves, A. Volkman; Project Manager: A. Tamalonis, Stakeholders: P. Wells, A. Moorhead, K. Tinney, Content: M. Donahue and team
Duration
6 months
Scope
Visual Design, UX Design
Audience
Medical Students, Medical Residents and Physician Judges
Background
The AMA hosts two events twice per year, (1) a research challenge & poster symposium, and (2) a poster showcase. During these events medical students compete for a cash prize, by conducting research projects. The medical student outreach team, in charge of the contests, requested our team find a way to replace the platform they were using for both events, Underline.io. The outreach team had a few issues with it, their biggest issue being that the main focus of the tool showcased the written abstract over the student’s posters.
The two events have a substantial impact on AMA membership as they provide medical students and residents with ways to stand out from the competition when they begin their job search. Additionally, they provide doctors the opportunity to get involved with the AMA early in their career.
The Challenge
After speaking with stakeholders, my team deciphered that the main problem the users were facing is misinterpreting the contest rules that declared the abstract to be more important than the poster itself, given the layout of the current platform.
During this project we encountered several constraints. We were building within Drupal so certain design choices ended up not being technically feasible such as the design for replies in comments. Also, due to sprint timing some of what was built didn’t match the designs exactly particularly with comments. The business wanted to work with as many current components as we had, so we could only design a certain number of new components.
We were looking to design a platform that allows students and residents to post their work, for judges to rate their work and for people to comment on their work. Commenting and rating were brand new functionality we added to our existing experience. We also had to back up adding these new features to the enterprise experience by coming up with different use cases.
The Opportunity
Early on we planned for scalability, since we had received requests from other business units for requests of micro-sites that could promote what their specific business unit was in charge. Our current micro-site platform was very limited in what it could do and didn’t align with our design system so the main objective of the project was to move that experience on our enterprise site’s architecture. Before the project, the microsite infrastructure lived on a platform hosted by Acquia. Some other issues we experienced with the Acquia platform were that it had dated designs, was difficult to use, and made it so that the content editors had to understand two different systems instead of only one.
The Approach
My usual process involves seeing what's out there to gather inspiration from current platforms and experiences. If it’s a complicated process I’ll usually map out all the steps involved in that process. Then building a few options with our design system that help solve the problem. Another important approach I took here was by working component by component rather than designing the entire experience at once.
Overall page templates
To get an idea of the layout of the pages I worked on lo-fi wireframes of the overall page templates first. For the layout I took inspiration from the current platform as well as sites that focus on display of visuals, such as dribbble and awwards. From there I was able to extrapolate the specific components I would need to create to make the entire vision come together. I used the Bloo UI Kit to quickly create the lo-fi frames.
Media and Content Containers
First I drilled down on components that housed the content students were submitting. I created the following:
The Poster Container
A container hosted by Adobe that we could embed into each of the pages. This would give the students the opportunity to upload their posters via pdf format. The embed allowed users to zoom into posters and move around the posters so they could view it form all angles. I reformatted the embed so it matched our design system.
The Abstract Container
A container that would hold the abstract of their research project. We decided to provide general section headings to organize the content better instead of having a full block of text.
The Video Container
The last container hosted a video on the brightcove platform. The container allowed for student’s to record a 3 to 5 minute video presentation on their work. This part was not required to participate in the contest so we also had to account for what would happen if this element was missing.
Interactive Components
The last components we worked on were components users would interact with. Specifically we create a ratings module, a commenting module, a jump navigation, the search bar and the results pattern. Each of these components, except for the jump navigation took it’s own sprint. When we were finished with those components we moved onto the connecting pieces, like the navigation experience, and our senior designer, Allison, worked on the landing page.
The Outcome
We created a digital product that met the needs of the student outreach team, but is also scalable to meet other teams needs. For instance, our board is now working with our team to create a place to host leadership opportunities with the AMA.
The Impact
From an event with about 800 participants we converted 2 doctors to full membership. That may seem small, but in order to become a member a person must have graduated with a medical degree from an accreditted university and practice in the United States. There's a lot of verification that goes into membership. Additionally, we had 18 registrations, which is when a user signs up an for an AMA account giving them access to our digital products. There are no requirements for that, the account exists for lead generation so we can find doctors who use our digital products and attempt to convert them to members.
The student outreach team, the main stakeholders in the project, provided glowing reviews of the platform we created for them. We're in the process of collecting their feedback, so we can make improvements to the platform before next year's larger research challenge. We also found during UAT and smoke testing about 20 bugs or enhancements we need to make before next launch, so our team will also being assiting the developers implement those fixes before the next event.