SCORE Responsive Redesign
The SCORE® Portal is an innovative, nonprofit initiative to provide residents and residency programs with high-quality educational materials and a structured program for self-learning in all areas of general surgery and related specialties. The content of the portal is aligned with the SCORE Curriculum Outline, a list of topics to be covered in a five-year general surgery residency. The portal houses a variety of content, including modules, videos, self-assessment questions, and book chapters. In 2016, SCORE asked Silverchair and I to help develop a plan to modernize the SCORE portal, which had been hosted on Silverchair’s platform since 2013.
Before any design work began, I worked with SCORE to poll users and hold user testing sessions to gain insight about how users navigated what was then the current version of the site, what they liked, and what they thought needed improvement. The results of that user feedback and other business drivers helped to focus the update on three key areas: making the site responsive for mobile devices, improving the information architecture, and upgrading search. Two major user personas, shown above, were created to help the client, Silverchair, and I to help communicate about user needs and where to focus our efforts in the redesign.
We analyzed the existing site to identify the features that needed to be maintained and developed a plan to improve the organization and navigation.
Through wireframe iterations using InVision, I developed an open, clean, mobile-first design for the portal. Module pages, the core of the site, are easier to navigate and read on mobile devices, with greater emphasis on the primary content and less on the related features and progress tracking. Most attention was given to pages that were found to be highly used by residents on multiple devices.
After agreeing on the structure of the wireframes, I developed a design system styleguide for the portal, opting for a professional black & white approach. The style guide also served as a reference for the developers implementing the changes so that every single page did not require a fresh design.