University of Michigan Medical Services - A mobile application to evaluate medical students
Target Audience
Doctors , teaching and mentoring first and second year medical students at the medical school
Background
My Role
Design Research, Information Architecture, Content Strategy, Interaction Design, Visual Design
The medical board at the University had come to notice that students were not receiving substantial feedback from faculty. The current evaluation system being used by them is web-based and they believed that a mobile application would be the optimal solution. I was thus hired by the University of Michigan Medical School Information Services (MSIS) as an UX Researcher/ Designer to design a mobile application framework for the same.
Design Challenge Definition
A meeting was organized to meet with the stakeholders of the project, essentially the dean and some senior doctors. This phase helped me understand the goals, scope and requirements of the project. It also helped me understand the nature of the project which would later help me plan the schedule of my project.
Design Research
Next step was carrying out the research phase of the project. Around 10 interviews were conducted with faculty aat the Medical School. In contrast to the survey, these interviews helped in getting a rich and detailed understanding of a relatively smaller subset of users.
Research also involved going through several papers based on characteristics of medical students that help define them as good medical professionals. Having done this, I came up with a persona to define my target audience.
My target persona was that of a senior doctor, who tries to balance time between work and family, wants to impart quality education, yet struggles to submit evaluations on time.
A survey designed to learn about the technology habits of the UM Medical School faculty was emailed to instructors in the Emergency Medicine and Internal Medicine departments. We received 43 responses.
Ideation
Sketching is one of the most efficient ways of exploring ideas so I began sketching out the my thoughts on paper. I later sat down for a brainstorming session with designers, developers and analysts at MSIS with an intention of inviting suggestions, criticisms and changes. Once I had received comments and suggestions from colleagues, I could now picture some interactions in the application. I started to ideate and create a robust concept map which helped me make sense of my ideas.
Design
My approach through the designing of the application has been to make the experience as easy as can be. The color blue was chosen as the primary color for the application as it signifies dependability and authority.I even looked into keeping the app consistent with the style guide of other applications used by the Medical School.
