Managing continuous education requirements - KnowBi Learning

Company overview
Knowbi learning is a webapp as well as a mobile application which provides an easy and efficient way for dental professionals across the United states to manage their Continuous education requirements and track their license renewal process.
Project type
Industry - Team project
Project Status
Shipped and launched!
Team members
Product Manager - (1)
Lead Product Designer - Me
UI Designers - (3)
Software developers - (5)
Key Responsibilites
User interviews, Stakeholder maps, Persona, How might we activity, Ideation, Rapid sketching, Wireframes, User testing, Iteration, Impact-Effort matrix, Information Architecture, High-fidelity designs.
At a glance
Brief overview of the entire project
The problem
Managing and tracking continuous education is a well-known problem for all medical professionals. Many of them do not have an efficient way of doing these which often messes up their license renewal process.  Finding out the right course to do that is accepted by the state board is also a challenge for these professionals.
The overarching design challenge
Design a platform to help dental professionals across the United States by providing them content for continuous medical education as well as tracking and managing their CME requirements for license renewals.
The solution
I, along with a team of 3 designers designed a web application as well as a mobile platform that provided the appropriate content needed for continuous medical education, managed the requirements of the dental professionals depending on their state as well as their profession and tracked their requirements for a smooth and efficient license renewal process.
In the numbers
The shipped product had the following impact -
4
Applications designed for the knowBi ecosystem to help fulfill CE requirements
50+
Courses, live events, webinars hosted on the knowBi learning platform by various content providers
10k+
Dental professionals registered on KnowBi learning platform to take CME courses, purchase tickets for events and webinars.
The process
But, how did I get to the solution?
Background
Understanding the context
To understand this design space, I spoke to many dental professionals which our client knew to understand how the license renewal process work and broadly what problems do they think exist in this process.
Stakeholder map
Targeting the direct and the indirect users who are affected by the problem space
After understanding the context, I realized that there are many parties involved in the problem space and solving for just one party is not going to solve the problem. Thus, I made a stakeholder map to understand and identify other stakeholders who should be targetted while designing.
This case study : Designing for CME content receivers (Web-app)
For the sake of this case study, I am focussing on our design process for the receivers of the CME content - dental professionals who are take courses to complete CME requirements, manage and track their license renewal process.
User research
Digging deeper to understand the painpoints
After getting a broad level idea of what the problems were in the CME license renewal process, I conducted user interviews and contextual inquiries to understand the exact pain points faced by the dental professionals in their CME process. I identified the following painpoints.
What courses should I take?
Many dental professionals were confused about what courses they should take to fulfill their CE requirements
Are my requirements fulfilled?
The dental professionals also had difficulty tracking the courses which they took.
License renewal is difficult
The dental professionals also found the license renewal process very difficult to track and manage
The design opportunity
How might we design a platforms for dental professionals by providing them right content to fulfil their CE requirements and help them manage and track their license renewal process?
Persona
Let’s meet Jeena - Our primary persona
To make sure that the entire team keeps the target user in mind while designing, I created a user persona which we aimed to use throughout the design process.
How might we activity - Ideation
Brainstorming to solve Jeena’s painpoints and frustrations
After understanding the pain points faced by the users and crafting a design goal, we used the how might we activity to brainstrom some possible solutions which could solve the user’s pain points and frustrations.
Device selection
Selecting the medium of interaction
Before we could move on to the brainstorming stage, we had to select a medium of interaction for our solution. We explored some options by considering how accessible the medium would be to target audience. We ended up selecting all the devices since the user had easy access to them.
Iteration #1
Sketching out some ideas to solve the identified problems
I sketched out some ideas to solve the identified problems to visualize and brainstorm some the features for our solution and map out the users journey.
User testing
But, the client and the users weren’t satisfied. We discovered more problems!
I sketched out some ideas to solve the identified problems to visualize and brainstorm some the features for our solution and map out the users journey.
New design opportunities
We redefined the design opportunities to solve the new requirements!
1
How might we design a platform that provides online courses, tickets to live events, webinars for CME  and an efficient way for to find appropriate courses?
2
How might we bundle courses, live events and webinars together to help users easily find courses by their preferred course providers?
3
How might we help users track and manage category specific CE requirements for a single license as well as multiple licenses?
Iteration #2
Refining our sketches to accommodate the new requirements
I refined our existing sketches to accommodate some new problems which we had identified.
Impact effort matrix
Prioritizing features with the software developers, client and designers
After we had an idea of what features our solution was going to include, I collaborated with the client to understand the impact of every feature and the software developers and designers to understand the effort required to develop those features. I then created an impact effort matrix to show prioritize the features.
Information Architecture
Making a blue print of our solution
After we had an idea of what features our solution was going to include, I collaborated with the client to understand the impact of every feature and the software developers and designers to understand the effort required to develop those features. I then created an impact effort matrix to show prioritize the features.
High-fidelity Designs
Making the high-fidelity designs with the UI Designers
After I had the sketches and the information architecture in my hand, I collaborated with our UI Designers to create high-fidelity version of our designs to hand them over to the developers.
1
How might we design a platform that provides online courses, tickets to live events, webinars for CME  and an efficient way for to find appropriate courses?
2
How might we bundle courses, live events and webinars together to help users easily find courses by their preferred course providers?
3
How might we help users track and manage category specific CE requirements for a single license as well as multiple licenses?
1
How might we design a platform that provides online courses, tickets to live events, webinars for CME  and an efficient way for to find appropriate courses?
2
How might we bundle courses, live events and webinars together to help users easily find courses by their preferred course providers?
3
How might we help users track and manage category specific CE requirements for a single license as well as multiple licenses?
1
How might we design a platform that provides online courses, tickets to live events, webinars for CME  and an efficient way for to find appropriate courses?
2
How might we bundle courses, live events and webinars together to help users easily find courses by their preferred course providers?
3
How might we help users track and manage category specific CE requirements for a single license as well as multiple licenses?
Retrospective
Reflecting on my learnings!
1
Be bold, accept your mistake and recover fast.
This was my very first project I worked on as a designer and I faced a lot of challenges. The first designs which I created did not satisfy the client and I made some mistakes understanding the problem space, but I quickly recovered by putting in extra efforts.
2
Back up your design decisions with strong rationale
Some of my design decisions were not appreciate by my team or the client but when I started articulating them clearly and backing up every decision with a rationale, my design decisions were accepted!
3
Adapting to project’s changing requirements
After we had our first version out, we were encountered with a series of new requirements which constituted to a lot of changes to the core structure of the solution. I took on those requirements and went above and beyond to accomodate them in the product.
Thank you for reading!