Presented By: Jessica Saw, CI Med (MedTerms)
Co-Authors: Anthony Bosshardt, CI Med (MedTerms)
Rand Kittani, CI Med (MedTerms)
Gaurav Nigam, CI Med (MedTerms)
Chad Olson, CI Med (MedTerms)

Purpose
When designing online learning resources in the medical education space, it is important to understand the medical student experience. Identifying students' study workflows and their pain points is a critical step in developing resources. We collaborated with a professional software design team and used co-design and user-centered design methods to garner information about students' experiences in self-study. This poster summarizes the results derived from the application of these methods.

Methods 
A series of hour-long focus groups and workshops (n=10 medical students) were run over a six-month period. These sessions, facilitated by an educator and a user experience designer, were divided into three sections: (1) gathering experiences on shortcomings and benefits of existing resources, (2) drawing flowcharts illustrating study habits and resources used, and (3) designing the "ideal" structure for delivery of a specified topic. Themes were identified as "user requirements" for the software development team.

Results 
Our findings showed that students need support in making mental maps of disease relationships (e.g., organizing diseases/conditions into categories and sub-categories, relating diseases that affect multiple organ systems). Students also identified a need for several interactive tools, including one that would help them compare similarly presenting diseases, and one that would list the differential diagnosis given a single clinical symptom. Students also showed appreciation for content that was relevant to their level of training, easily searchable, and supplemented by self-assessment.

Conclusion 
User-centered design methods identified multiple student needs not yet addressed by existing educational resources. These results illustrate "problem versus solution discovery" and prevents designing solutions to the wrong problems. The results from this study will be used to design the next iteration of MedTerms, an online resource co-designed by medical students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.