Meet MCN
Master Clinician Network is an online educational platform for students and clinicians in speech-language pathology. They work with hundreds of universities to augment training students receive with guided observation and other clinical training videos. When MCN came to Sembit in 2019, the latest version of their system was already live and mostly working, but the original developers wanted to move on, and MCN needed a team that could maintain, improve, and evolve the platform.
The Challenge? Desktop UI and an Uncommon Back End
MCN's web application was written in Angular on the front end, and the back end was written in Go, which is a less common technology for web apps. Also, the web pages were laid out for large screens, and navigating them on a phone was very challenging. With their core user base as university students, the lack of a mobile UI was becoming an increasing problem.
What We Built? A Mobile-First User Interface.
Sembit re-imagined the user interface and navigational structure of the various parts of the platform, distilling the student experience to four areas, with one additional area for faculty. We built out the mockups with real Angular pages and reviewed these with the MCN subject matter experts. Then we wired the pages to the Go API, adjusting authentication and routes as needed. At the same time, we split out the Admin section of the platform to a separate web app, which improved both security and performance.
Next, we worked with MCN to perform usability testing with a series of volunteers from both students and faculty, on both mobile and desktop. This allowed us to fine-tune the interface and eliminate trouble spots before public launch. Originally there was discussion of creating help screens or videos to explain the user interface overhaul, but the usability testing revealed that the new layout was so intuitive that faculty and students were able to easily perform their tasks without help of any kind.
The Result? Happy Users.
The new version of the system rolled out smoothly. In addition to improving the look and feel and navigation of the system, we eliminated waiting for student report information by replacing the ORM-dependent reporting logic with a single SQL query. What used to take 17 seconds now takes 300ms. The combination of a more intuitive interface, better performance, and other improvements has resulted in fewer support calls and higher mobile use. Students and faculty can now use the platform regardless of what device they have available.