Developing a central hub where medical certification boards can manage their accreditations.
The Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) approached Codal to design and build its Learner Reporting System (LRS), a centralized hub where certification boards and course providers can manage and report their accreditations.
The Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education’s (ACCME) mission is to identify, develop, and promote rigorous national standards for quality medical education that improves physician performance and patient care.
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 design team needed to ensure that the user experience was personalized, yet consistent, for all use cases.
Codal began by examining the LRS’ predecessor, a platform called PARS. Noting the pain points in its UX, 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:
Due to the size and activity of the platform’s current user base, our UX 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.
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.
