Improving Learning Outcomes for Medical Students
Final Designs
Product Background
Sketchy is an online learning platform which harnesses the power of visual learning and memory palace techniques to more easily entrain complex medical information for MCAT and medical school students.
Sketchy currently boasts that approximately 84% of Med school and MCAT students use their site and methods as a primary source for learning medical material. They also hold that 96% of their users have self-reported higher exam scores due to the use of Sketchy’s services.
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Review Card from Sketchy
My Role + Duration of Project
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My role was as a UX researcher and UI designer. The project was a six week contract with sketchy medical, and I collaborated with 3 UX designers as well as the VP of marketing at Sketchy Medical.
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This project lasted for 6 weeks.
Research
Stakeholder interviews
We started off with interviewing the stakeholder’s needs over two sessions. The stakeholder was both interested in seeing where we’d go with our discovery and also had fears about what that data could mean for the direction of their product.
I decided to ask him about the fears he had with the product, as well as any constraints he had for our task.
User interviews
We conducted user interviews with 6 medical professionals and students. 3 of whom had used Sketchy in the past and were familiar with their memory training system.
Objective: Identify why adding a social component to Sketchy could be beneficial for the students and for Sketchy.
Research focal points
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Is there a need for interaction between learners?
Why would learners want to connect?
What can learners learn from each other?
What do learners want to know about each other
Does connecting with other students help in any way in memorizing?
The information obtained in our user interviews went through several rounds of live brainstorming, which you can see here:
Initial Affinity Grouping - click to view
Refined Grouping- click to view
Core Themes from the Affinity Map
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It became clear to us that our interviewees had a strong preference for the following, and these became the focus of our problem space:
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​Sharing material (written and visual)
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Repetition and discussion with others of the topic at hand
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Group relating (socialized learning)
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Keeping Organized
Competitors
Competitor Analysis​​​
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We looked at these sites and the ways they either allowed or disallowed for user-to-user interaction, notation and any other methods of peer learning/sharing. Two of the most prominent highlights from the competitor analysis to keep in mind during the ideation phase were:
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Direct connections between content and community. People weren't chatting with others without the context of the material being learned. This seems to help minimize noise distractions in conversations.
The ability to Upvote/Downvote relevant information. This was something that we felt was important, as peers evaluating the usefulness of content would determine how visible postings made by users would be.
Ideations
Where our ideation phase led us:
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We had many ideas come up during our “Where do we go from here?” phase after conducting our research.
Some suggestions/ideas from our group were:
Creating a reward system for users to keep motivated.
Adding a forum to the site for users to engage with each other
Creating a note taking system.
Help students teach each other about the material in the context of the system already offered.
Narrowing down our scope
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I presented my idea to the stakeholder, of finding a way to have students verbalize information learned to one another. My reasoning for this was:
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It is a way for the student to connect with others on the material
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Students can refine their learning through discourse
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It could meet the majority of needs from our user interviews
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The idea was well received. While I cannot take credit for having invented this idea of teaching others what you are learning I can provide its main source.
Feynman Technique
The Feynman Technique is a method of learning that unleashes your potential and forces you to develop a deep understanding.
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Richard Feynman was a Nobel prize-winning physicist. His real superpower, however, was his ability to explain complicated subjects to others in simple terms. He realized that jargon, vague words, and complexity reveal a lack of understanding.
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There are four key steps to the Feynman Technique:
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Choose a concept you want to learn about
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Explain it as simply as possible to another person
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Reflect, Refine, and Simplify
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Organize and Review
Design
User Flows + Wireframing
4 major user flows were created to best understand how we could implement our research into visual design.
Early wireframes included the idea of adding a sketching space (later nixed) as the stakeholder thought it would take too long for the developers to implement.
Hifi Screens
Refinement and HiFi designs
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After many rounds of discussions with the fellow designers, we concluded our UI needed:
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1. Comments within the context of the video being discussed which allowed for text and visuals
2. Saving important notes for later personal use
3. Creating a multi-variant advanced search function to refine the results of the search through the comments made
4. Peer-controlled upvoting in order to maintain accessibility to the most usable/informative comments
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Our comments section needed to be oriented to the videos and review cards as much as possible.
This meant addressing the ways we could keep keep the default visibility of most upvoted comments at the top. This was especially important, as we were interested in keeping the signal in the signal-to-noise ratio high.
Prototyping and Testing
Feedback from Prototype Testing
With the filtering-by-symbol function, to see specific discussion threads by symbols, we received feedback that people were slightly confused by their use. This confusion is due in part to the fact that unfortunately our users who tested the prototype were not yet familiar with the symbol system in sketchy– thus their confusion may not be accurate to those who already engage Sketchy's services. That led us to believe that further testing on current users of Sketchy would be (perhaps) a more accurate reflection of the usability of that filter function.
Future steps
With further testing, we could hone in on better iterations and hand those off to the developers to be built.
It was a great project, and required a lot of thinking outside the box. Users really appreciated the thoughtfulness of engaging the comments section as a way to learn and share (teach) what one knows about a particular topic. This of course was taken from thinking along the lines of the Feynman Technique as a way to cement one's knowledge on a topic.