The Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) identifies, develops, and promotes rigorous national standards for quality medical education to improve physician performance and patient care.
Services & Technology
The Challenge
Creating a centralized hub for massive amounts of content and data
ACCME needed a central hub where medical certification boards could manage, track, and report various accreditations. The LRS would be an inherently complex platform with a wide range of user types, so our UX/UI design team needed to ensure that the user experience was personalized, yet consistent, for all use cases.
Discovery
Gathering requirements for the new Learner Reporting System
Codal began by examining the LRS’ predecessor, a platform called PARS. Noting the pain points in its UX/UI, our designers determined what areas needed an overhaul and which ones needed a simple refresh.
Through heavy collaboration between ACCME stakeholders, our design team, and business analysts, a feature list for the first release was solidified. We crafted a new sitemap that reorganized the content of the site while accommodating new features and functionalities.
Our team mapped out a three-phase plan to meet ACCME’s project requirements:
Design several different platform interfaces to meet the specific needs and expectations of each user type.
Tailor the platform’s layout to complement large amounts of data visualization.
Engineer the platform’s front and back end utilizing the frameworks Angular and Django.
Development
Optimizing the presentation and navigation of data for various user personas
Due to the size and activity of the platform’s current user base, our UX/UI designers modernized the look and feel of the preexisting site—so as not to alienate current users and potentially disrupt workflows.
After formulating a high-level design strategy, Codal began crafting barebones wireframes.
One of the challenges of the previous platform was poor data visualization—tables had poor readability, content was difficult to find, and the search process was maddening. Our team remedied this flaw by not only introducing sorting and filtering functions, but also improved search results, restyled tables, and a feature that allows users to input data en masse.
We also needed to tailor different iterations of the website to various user personas. ACCME’s learning system needed to serve administrators, medical board members, and course providers. And the user experience needed to be personalized, yet consistent across different user groups.
By modernizing the existing aesthetic of PARS, Codal was able to imbue the updated platform with a familiarity that would resonate with all user types. Yet within that general look, Codal rearranged and reprioritized functions to match specific user needs and expectations.
The best efforts of our UX design team are in vain without a robust development process for translating designs into actionable, usable code. To buttress LRS’ retooled user journey, Codal’s engineers built out both the front and back end of the web platform.
The front end was constructed in AngularJS, a framework that allows for simplified, agile development and testing. And the back end was built with Django, a Python framework that enables rapid development and reusability of code.
The Result
Streamlined workflows and better data reporting for medical certification boards
Codal was able to design, develop, test, and launch a highly complex and cutting-edge platform in just six months.
ACCME’s LRS currently houses around 1,700 accredited organizations, 1.5 million credits, and 400,000 completion records. And thanks to Codal, administrators, medical board members, and course providers can access and report this data through a fast, intuitive, and personalized user experience.
