2015 - 2017
Michigan Medicine
Mobile, Web
Originally, my task was to update a bunch of legacy sites owned by the university hospital and make them look prettier. But after scoping out the work, I noticed a few bigger problems:
- We repeated information in multiple places, some of which was outdated and hard to track in the static legacy sites.
- Our users (medical researchers) often couldn't find the information they were looking for.
- The head of the department wanted to build a few interactive tools for the site, which would work best on a dynamic site.
- Medical research needed to be updated on a consistent basis—every week, new research would come out. None of this stuff worked on mobile.
Goal: I made it my mission to take this complicated web infrastructure and make it:
- Something that could be updated with the click of a button, and
- Useful, usable, and delightful for a non-technical person to solve their problems.
Technical Constraints: Due to some of the datatypes we needed to pass around under the hood, this problem couldn't be solved with an out-of-the-box web solution. Plus, the front-end features we wanted to build required custom code. So, Ruby on Rails it was.
Qualitative Research: I interviewed several (3-5) folks in the research department about what type of customers they worked with. This gave me insight into what users would be looking for when they came to the site, and how to organize our information to best serve them. You can see my notes here:
Technical Constraints: Due to some of the datatypes we needed to pass around under the hood, this problem couldn't be solved with an out-of-the-box web solution. Plus, the front-end features we wanted to build required custom code. So, Ruby on Rails it was.
Qualitative Research: I interviewed several (3-5) folks in the research department about what type of customers they worked with. This gave me insight into what users would be looking for when they came to the site, and how to organize our information to best serve them. You can see my notes here:
Through this process, I created a piece of software that:
- Had all of the information in one place, rather than scattered across a bunch of legacy sites,
- Made the sites accessible on mobile devices,
- Built a custom database with an interactive UI on top of it so that researchers could add more data as it came out, and
- Took a bunch of ten-step processes and reduced them into the click of a button, saving researchers time, money, and headache!
As an added bonus, the number of graduate students applying to work in that particular lab surged and grant funding increased. Collaborators from around the world began to reach out for partnership to further that particular area of research.
I'd call that a success 🙂
