MKSAP 19 Audio Companion
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 MKSAP Audio Companion is the perfect way for busy physicians to meet their CME requirements and keep up with the latest diagnostic tools, clinical management practices, and treatment protocols. It’s a top audio CME choice for internal medicine specialists on the go. Oakstone needed strategic guidance on how to transition their current MKSAP 19 product into a subscription service and introduce gamification to make the app more engaging.
Project Details
Company Type
Publicly-traded company
Industry
Healthcare, Publishing
Product Type
Responsive Web App & Mobile App
Services
UX Design, UI Design, Product Strategy & Design Workshop, Product Strategy
Deliverables
Wireframes, High Fidelity Designs, Design System, Gamification Strategy
Design and Product Strategy Workshop
During our product design & strategy workshop, we identified the following goals and outcomes for the project:
- Audit the existing MKSAP web & mobile apps to identify areas of improvement
- Translate the existing MKSAP product into a subscription service
- Redesign the apps to improve usability, efficiency, and engagement
- Introduce a gamification strategy that increases engagement and product “stickiness”
- It wasn’t possible to pick up where you left off on a track, or to view progress within a category. For example, if I started listening to tracks in Cardiology, the next time I logged in, I couldn’t see what I’d listened to previously or which track I was in the middle of.
- It’s not possible to browse content without interrupting the audio experience. The audio player is embedded in the page, so clicking around to see what to listen to next would immediately load a new page, stopping the audio.
- One of the primary purposes of the app is to claim Continuing Medical Education (CME) credits. The app lacked the ability to track what you’ve claimed credit for.
- As for usability issues, the audio player wasn’t sticky and scrolled within the page. For audio players, people must be able to interact with the player easily, ideally one-handed since people are often driving or exercising while listening. This makes two-handed interactions problematic.
We redesigned the user experience to make the audio player sticky to the bottom of the page. This change also allows users to browse through the content without interrupting the audio experience. We also updated the tracks to show whether someone has claimed CME credit for the content. Lastly, we added a progress tracker to each individual track, so people could see whether they have listened to a piece of content, and if so, whether they completed it or not.
Gamification
Merriam Webster defines gamification as the process of adding games or gamelike elements to something (such as a task) so as to encourage participation.
Gamification can be useful for educational apps in the following ways:
- Increased User Engagement: By making tasks feel more like games, users are likely to find the experience more enjoyable and engaging.
- Improved User Retention: Gamification can increase retention rates by encouraging users to return to an app or website.
- Enhanced User Satisfaction: Rewarding users for their actions can lead to higher satisfaction levels.
- Behavioral Change: Gamification can be used to motivate users to change their behaviors positively, such as promoting healthier habits or improving learning outcomes.
For MKSAP, we wanted to evaluate what types of gamification would best suit an educational platform. We referenced successful learning apps like Duolingo for inspiration. Ultimately, we recommended the following gamification elements for MKSAP:
- Quizzes: Users can test themselves on various topics and earn rewards or recognition for their performance. For MKSAP, you could “unlock” the monthly Q&A content as a reward “Complete the quiz to unlock this month’s Q&A”.
- Progress bars, levels, badges: help users visualize how close they are to achieving specific goals, such as language fluency in a language-learning app For MKSAP, badges could be awarded after completing tracks within a section.
- Streaks: Encourage users to complete desired actions that are aligned with their goals and build habits. For MKSAP, we created streaks for consecutive weekly listening and perfect quiz scores.
The gamification elements combined with the new user experience created a much more seamless and satisfactory audio learning app for Oakstone’s customers.
