Redesigned Picmonic’s Mobile and Web Apps With User Input
Increased paid signups by 400%, daily active users by 300%, and the dev team’s velocity by 500%.
Picmonic enabled a community of students in medical school to study better with mnemonics, and was looking to grow their current market and expand to new markets quickly.
Goals & Results
- Grow the userbase by expanding to nursing students
- 4x new paid nursing signups than expected due to quiz
- More markets quickly followed with similar success - Increase the number of Daily Active Users (DAUs)
- 3x improvement to DAU thanks to spaced rep quiz
- Freemium enabled with 2x CVR - Improve engineering’s velocity
- 500% improvement. 6 week sprints reduced to 1 week
People & Time
Users
- Students — MD / DO / NP / Pharm D / PA / LPN / RN
- Educators
- Institutions
- Engineers & Product
Team & Timeline
Problems
- We don’t know what nursing students need
- We don’t know what else medical students need
- Waterfall design, accessibility problems, & no reusable components
Solutions
Solution for Nursing Students
I interviewed nursing students to learn how they studied, and what they thought of our current solution.
I learned the majority of nursing students used quizzing apps like quizlet, and preferred them to our existing solution.
I built a quiz prototype and ran nursing students through it. They had some initial problems due to difficulty typing in answers on mobile screens.
A multiple choice quiz option worked best with nursing students, and resulted in 4 times the nursing signups than expected.
Solution for Med Students
Interviewing medical students taught me about their need to learn thousands of new facts quickly and efficiently. I found that many of them were using spaced repetition to solve this problem on their own. Some of them were using a product that did it for them called osmosis.
I built a spaced repetition algorithm and that surfaced facts for medical students in their dashboard, prompting them to start what I named the ‘daily quiz’.
The daily quiz rewarded the player with points and other achievements. This all had a positive impact on students test scores, as well increasing our daily active users by 3x.
Solutions for Institutions & Engineering
During my work I found that product and engineering teams were using waterfall design processes that left the product with inconsistent patterns that were not accessible.
I trained the existing team and new hires in new lean design processes. I built a design system for mobile and desktop apps that was within the WCAG. This work had a 500% improvement in engineerings velocity, as well as gaining us new revenue streams from university partners like the University of Phoenix.
