Oakstone

Oakstone is a leading provider of continuing medical educational (CME) content developed by renowned clinicians from the most respected institutions and societies in the world. For over 45 years, they’ve partnered with practitioners from Harvard Medical School, UCSF, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, the Cleveland Clinic, and more.

Oakstone’s CME content is available in video, audio, and print formats providing opportunities for unlimited 24/7 access to a wide range of medical content related to board reviews, clinical updates, and journal-based clinical research summaries paired with expert audio commentary. Clinicians are required to earn a minimum number of CME credits per year to maintain their board certification. 

Oakstone delivers this content through a variety of products including several integrated web apps and a mobile app. The system was outdated and through conversations with customers, they knew the application could be difficult and clunky to use.

Testimonials

Product Details

Company Type

Publicly-traded company

Industry

Healthcare, Publishing

Product Type

Web App & Mobile App

Services

UX Research, UX Design, UI Design, Product Strategy & Design Workshop, Product Strategy

Deliverables

Research Report, Product Roadmap, Wireframes, High Fidelity Designs, Prototype, Design System

Discovery & Research

At LunarLab, we never want to dive into a redesign project without a solid understanding of what’s working well and what’s not. Oakstone understands the value of basing design decisions on research, so we started our project with some discovery research to help guide us. Our primary goals through the research phase were to: 

  • identify any unknown pain points or usability issues
  • understand whether existing features like favorites, playlists, etc. were valuable
  • understand whether a mobile app is necessary for an optimal user experience 

We learned that many clinicians prefer to listen to their CME content on their commute. But because of technical limitations with the current web app, audio stops playing when the phone locks, causing a safety issue while driving. Additionally, some clinicians have long commutes and like to have several items queued up to listen to, but the current web app won’t automatically progress to the next piece of content. This forces the user to unlock the device and manually progress to the next item in the queue, again disrupting their experience. Last but not least, some clinicians consume their CME content at their hospital or practice during breaks, but poor wifi and cellular signals prevent content from loading or causes significant buffering to occur. 

Research report finding #3: Playlists can be very useful to people building up a queue of content to consume... But the current design isn’t user friendly or intuitive.
Research report finding #4: While the existing site can be accessed via a mobile device, there are major usability issues preventing users from accessing their content seamlessly and efficiently.

Design

With our usability issues identified, it was time to start thinking about ways to solve them. First and foremost, it was obvious that a mobile app would improve the user experience. A native app would support offline use, allow users to listen to their content while the phone was locked, and ensure that the next item in the listener’s queue would start automatically. 

We improved the usability of the media player to mirror the capabilities of other popular streaming platforms. We also redesigned how clinicians claim credit. In the previous version of the web app, a clinician would listen to a piece of content, and they would have to immediately take a quiz to claim credit it. The problem was that for people on-the-go, they didn’t have time to pull the car over and take a quiz right then and there. Additionally, if they navigated away from it in the app to a new piece of content, they had a hard time finding it again. In our redesign, anything in the queue is automatically compiled into a quiz – allowing people to listen to as much content as they’d like, and once they’re ready to claim credit, it’s all compiled for them into a single quiz.  

We designed the mobile and web apps using the same design across both, for a seamless, consistent experience no matter where you are. From a business standpoint, this redesign will help them increase subscription renewals, increase customer satisfaction, and decrease calls or complaints to customer service.

UI design mockups of Oakstone mobile app

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