GRADUATE MEDICAL EDUCATION
Helping medical students find their residency and fellowship programs with ease.
THE PROBLEM
Graduate Medical Education programs (residencies, fellowships and internships) are very important to Northwell Health. It is how we help shape the doctors of the future.
Our Graduate Medical Education section on our Drupal 7 website was extremely outdated and not user friendly. When it was built it was designed to follow what the Doctors who run the GME program thought was best. They dictated the Information Architecture to use very industry heavy terms that they average user might not understand and the content was not organized in a manor that was easy for the user to digest. It was very text heavy and hard to located the key facts about each program. For example, key application deadlines, where to apply, and what was needed to apply where often hidden in a body of text.
HIGH LEVEL TIMELINE
2 weeks for design and testing
KEY GOAL
To create a user friendly experience for our Graduate Medical Education programs.
MY ROLE
I was the lead interaction designer and UX researcher on this project.
I was tasked with creating a more engaging experience that showcases how innovative and exciting our GME programs are to prospective students while also making the search experience user friendly and maintaining our brand design standards. I also worked with our content strategists to make sure that they important information that was hidden in they past was featured in an easy to locate place on the page templates.
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I conducted user research including tree testing, first click testing, and competitive research to help make an informed IA and design for the program pages and the main GME section along with its search function. I also interviewed program coordinators and perspective students to see what they were each looking for in an ideal GME page.
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The final project deliverables was a new site information architecture and design mockups for the GME search and GME program pages.
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UNDERSTANDING THE USER
Our user set for this project was a little different from the typical user set that we see for other projects on our site.
The user we focused on for this project were medical students that were in the process of applying to residency and fellowship programs. We wanted to understand how they look for the programs they are interested in, what things were most important to them in their search, (ie. location, program specialty, compensation, research opportunities). To do this we interviewed a 8 current residents who had applied for our residency programs last year. We found that when they are looking at programs they wanted to be able to easily search programs by location and program specialty. They also wanted the important program information to be easy to find and to be able to scan the pages for the important information.
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We also interviewed the stakeholder to find out more about their use of industry terms and to see if it would be possible to find a middle point on using so more user friendly terms. Through these interviews we were able to find out why some of the terms were so important to them and we were also able to find places to compromise.
BREAKING DOWN THE PROCESS
After our research was completed and analyzed I moved on to creating mockups of the designs and the user interactions.
I created a program centric approach for each GME program to have its own detailed page/site depending on how much content the programs were able to provide. There are three types of program pages, Lite, Basic, and Advanced. They range in content size to accommodate programs that have very little content to programs that have very robust content. When designing the program templates I made sure that the vital program information was up to date and featured prominently for users who are interested in learning more and applying.
The other crucial part of the project was creating the new search experience for Graduate Medical Education. After looking at our research I felt it was best to use a type ahead search that would help the user find program based off of suggestions of what they were typing. It was also very important to the stakeholder to have the programs featured in some kind of a list format so I decided to use an accordion style display to group the content by their medical specialty so that users would be able to look at all the programs available in a specialty that they are interested in. We also added at tab so we could have the same accordion display experience based on location since that was found to be important by our users as well.
