My Journey at O.M.E

First 90 Days: I learned about the business and set up 1-on-1s with the leadership team and department members. This helped me to discover the current process and learn more about the organization's culture and operations. I partnered with Dr. Laura Lawson, Head of Corporate Development, to create Journey maps for the paths a medical student takes to becoming an M.D. at a traditional or longitudinal school. I established a process for better file management for the design team and shifted us to using Abstract for design version control (The team was previously using Dropbox to store design files). I join The Success Kids engineering guild and worked in sprints to deliver the new redesign for Faculty View.

6 Months: I participated in an event storming with the entire company to establish a viable 1st release for the faculty view beta. I partnered with the product team and collected user feedback during product discovery calls. I completed designs for Faculty view and performed VQA to ensure designs complied with our September 7th beta launch in 2020.

9 Months: I created a design system for Faculty View inside of Invision’s DSM (Design system manager) this resulted in engineering creating a components library using Meta’s React JS library. Faculty view was launched, and the product team and I continued to conduct customer feedback sessions. This led to implementing new features, including Custom Groups and Scheduler.

12+ Months:  Faculty View design work slowed down, and I started to shift into the B2C side of the business. I joined weekly discovery calls with medical students using the B2C product. I implemented, directed, and presented design concepts for new product directions resulting in a new iOS mobile app, lesson page templatization, and a flexible registration and checkout experience. I updated primary brand colors to be in compliance with WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards. I gave a presentation on the power of design systems, and the importance design has on business outcomes. The company started to grow, and I joined a new team to focus on the future of the B2C product. This resulted in me consulting with the co-founder and Lead Educator, Dr. Dustyn Williams, for 3+ months to redesign the lesson-based pedagogy.

The case study covers:

M.D. Learning Journey

Faculty Archetypes

Customer Feedback — Before Redesign

Redesign & Product Walkthrough

Customer Feedback — After Redesign

Design Metrics

The Problem

Medical institutions using OnlineMedEd as part of their curriculum weren't happy with the current product. Faculty users needed more robust, intuitive, and easy-to-read metrics to determine how their students were performing. Faculty users had the following unmet needs:

1. The ability to accurately report student activity during specific timeframes.

2. A way to add students to specific tracks or groups.

3. Helpful onboarding for faculty members and training to understand how to run reports and track students.

4. A way to drill into a student’s activity and see what they’ve completed.

5. The ability to drill into questions and see how many students got them right or wrong.

M.D. Learning Journey

There are two paths to learning a future physician can take. A medical student can attend a medical school with a traditional or longitudinal curriculum. Below you will find flow charts I put together in collaboration with Dr. Laura Lawson, Head of Corporate Development. These charts cover a medical student's journey through each curriculum.

Traditional Curriculum

Traditional = Blocks = Organ systems. You do one "class" at a time, usually for between 2-10 weeks. Each class focuses on a specific subject (eg. immunology, cardiology, etc) and your exams don't overlap.

Longitudinal Curriculum

Longitudinal = Multiple classes simultaneously. Students take microbiology, immune, respiratory, cardiology, etc. in an overlapping semester-based fashion, and the subjects should tie into each other. For example, a student can learn the heart's anatomy, microbiology related to the heart, immunology related to the heart, etc. Usually, there are larger midterms and finals that encompass multiple disciplines.

Faculty View Archetypes

Dean

The Dean of the School of Medicine oversees all aspects of the academic mission and achieves the objectives associated with the school's four planning pillars: education, research, clinical care, and community engagement.

Goals

Foster professionalism, diversity, and a positive work and learning environment

Ensure the clinical environment provides high-quality patient care and is conducive to appropriate educational and research program integration

Needs

Develop and maintain good relationships with students, trainees, faculty, staff, and alumni

Assure active engagement and collaboration with community partners to improve health through partnership, outreach, health advocacy, and engaged scholarship

Painpoints

Provide the annual budget of the school

Meetings, e-mails, faculty hiring, fundraising, and deciding which departments are allowed to hire new professors

Clerkship Director

Clerkship Directors ensure that the rotation's curriculum complements the school's pre-clinical and overall clinical curriculum, coordinate resident and faculty teaching of students within the department, and assume responsibility for the evaluation of student performance.

Goals

Negotiate time, money, and space towards the success of the clerkship

Ensure that the chair agrees about priorities and clerkship faculty are also in accord about priorities

Needs

Keep the chair posted about important developments and problems

Know what students and residents they will supervise, what classes they will teach, and what programs they will run

Painpoints

Spending a large amount of time with administrative tasks and responsibilities

Identifying conflicts in student education and teaching time

Clerkship Coordinator

The coordinator plays an active role in the ongoing development of tools, approaches, and systems designed to improve students' educational experiences during clerkships.

Goals

Be a liaison to students, faculty, residents, community, faculty, sites, and school administration for any issues or questions relating to the clerkship

Understand the curricular goals, policies, and standards of the medicine clerkship, department, and medical school thoroughly

Needs

Ability to deal effectively with all levels of personnel, both within and beyond the university

Understand thoroughly the curricular goals, policies, and standards of the medicine clerkship, department, and medical school

Painpoints

Conflict resolution and negotiating skills with professionalism, discretion, and confidentiality

Monitor the student evaluation process and maintain complete and accurate student files

Clinical Faculty

Clinical faculty plays a significant role in student education as instructors in the out-patient office, operating room, and wards. They may also help with academic sessions, evaluation, grading, and assist in developing and implementing curricular innovations.

Goals

Set students up for success through meetings and plans according to their progress

Properly aid students in conflicts and patient management

Needs

Adapt to work schedules and understanding the university governance structure

Transition seamlessly from resident to faculty member

Painpoints

Job security if budgets are cut

Relationships with residents who were recently their peers

Customer Discovery Calls

I partnered with Ryan O'keefe, the Director of Product, and Cody Bennett, the sales lead for institutional partnerships. We talked to several schools about their experience with the current Faculty View product. The medical schools we spoke to included Marian University, Florida State University, The University of North Carolina, Western University, and The University of Texas.

Customer Feedback

"Accurate data reporting is the biggest issue."

"I can't see student progress within certain timeframes."

"I don't know what it means for a student to complete a lesson."

"I need to be able to sort student data with filters."

"I want to create custom groups for students in my clerkships."

"I don't understand how to use the tool."

Insights

We uncovered a lot of great feedback from our customers. We knew we wouldn't be able to solve every problem by the time we launched the beta (August 7th, 2020). So we decided to first focus on solving the most important issues for our customers.

1. Create a helpful onboarding experience for faculty members and provide training sessions led by our customer success team and product managers.

2. Provide faculty members with accurate reports and give them access to filtering tools so they can drill into student work completion by timeframes, products, topics, and lessons.

3. Give faculty members access to student activity metrics on the group and individual levels.

Before & After Redesign

Onboarding — Flow Chart

Starting with onboarding allowed us to establish clear roles and permissions for faculty users. The institutional admin role was reserved for deans and the dean's office staff. This role would be our point person for the organization, and they would work with our sales and customer support teams to set up the new Faculty View product.

Once we knew how many student licenses a school wanted to purchase to use each of our products, a contract was sent out to the institutional admin to sign. Institutional admins would then have the ability to invite other faculty members to the product. These roles were known as institutional faculty members. Only the institutional admin or OnlineMedEd could remove members from the platform.

Design Metrics

We established design metrics so we could measure user engagement within Faculty View. This gave us insights into what users were using and not using.

Onboarding — Adding Students

Faculty members at medical institutions like to work inside spreadsheets. To make the experience easier for our customers, Faculty View users only needed to upload a CSV file. We provided a template inside a zip file that contained a guided PDF with upload instructions. They only needed to add their students by first name, last name, email, and class year to our template. Once their students were added, the next step was to upload the template into Faculty View. The system would take care of the rest and give students access to the appropriate products.

Dashboard Home — Flow Chart

Once students are added to Faculty View, the institutional admin is taken into the dashboard home. The dashboard home has three core touchpoints: student metrics, manage students and manage faculty. Faculty members invited to Faculty View by their admin will have limited controls such as search and creating filters.

Dashboard Home — Filtering Student Metrics

The dashboard home allowed faculty to filter student progress metrics inside of the consumer product by class years. Faculty needed to be able to filter by products they purchased from OnlineMedEd so they could provide their students with completion credits. The tool would also allow faculty to keep up with struggling students.

Faculty users needed to know if students were completing lessons and what part of the lesson the student completed (Notes, video, challenge questions, and flashcards). We provided faculty users with filters that allowed them to filter by products, topics, lessons, and dates.

Customer Feedback — Filtering Student Metrics

We received early feedback on filters from our users during our beta launch. Faculty users mentioned they would like the ability to select filters for a few specific products, topics, and filters at the group level (Class years). Originally, they could only select one at a time (design on the left), but in the new design, they could select multiple (design on the right).

Customer Feedback — Downloading Reports

We received feedback on downloading student reports. Faculty users liked that they could download student completion metrics into a CSV file. But, they wanted more detailed reports that showed completed lessons and cases by date and completed modules within each lesson. This was a highly desired feature for faculty members who were short on time. So we decided to introduce detailed report downloads.

Individual Student View

The individual student view is one of the most important views to faculty users. Once they selected a student profile to view, they got access to their student's completion metrics. Completion metrics gave faculty insights into what a student has completed for a lesson, such as notes, videos, challenge questions, and flashcards. As we talked to faculty users, every school was different, and most only cared if their students completed the notes, video, and challenge questions.

Customer Feedback — 2 Months Using New UX

After customers used the tool for 2 months, the product team and I decided it would be a good time to check in with our faculty users and set up a few discovery calls. We reached out to 3 schools with high activity levels. These schools included Florida State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Western University. 

Likes

Painpoints & Needs

Liked that the product is easy to use, intuitive, and LOVES the blue

Liked the filters feature

REALLY liked the search feature

Liked the CSV download feature

Liked seeing the student’s initials in the student group view

Found it annoying that applied filters didn’t transfer over when they clicked on the individual student page

Didn't like the 7 days default for the date picker (We change to 30)

Didn't like alphabetizing by a student’s first name in the student group view and wanted to start with their last name

Would like to filter student data based on PACE metrics

Would like to have a way to create groups (Only has a small subset of students they care about)

Would like a high-level summary view of student activity and more metrics for overall student activity (Metrics and reporting)

Would like to filter by students who have done nothing

Insights

We noticed some schools were using O.M.E as part of their curriculum. We based this hypothesis on customer discovery calls and usage data. We had roughly 25 schools using the faculty view product regularly. We decided to focus on adding more value to schools by:

1. Allowing users the ability to create custom groups. This was a highly requested feature as most users only had a few groups of students they needed to monitor.

2. Give users access to creating schedules for students inside the B2C tool that they could email to their students. This was a workaround until we could build scheduling features inside the tool. This would allow faculty users to assign specific lessons to their students with due dates.

3. Explore design work for how we could approach giving users access to more reporting data (e.g., The number of students who did not complete lessons during a set time frame).

Manage Groups (Custom Groups)

We decided to prioritize custom groups to add value to the faculty users using the O.M.E B2C product as part of their curriculum. Custom groups allowed users to monitor their student's progress and performance conveniently. Custom groups gave faculty users the ability to:

1. Create groups with existing students through a CSV file

2. Name their custom groups

3. Set a start and end date for their custom groups

4. Faculty Admins could create and assign groups to other faculty

Reporting & Metrics — Design Exploration

Below you will see the design exploration I did on ways we could provide reporting and metrics on student progression to faculty users. I shared designs with product managers and stakeholders but never had the chance to validate them with customers. I was moved to the B2B side of the business in 2021.