Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW)

Project Overview

Medical College of Wisconsin is a medical college in Wisconsin that serves local communities. Many of the outreach projects are done by medical students and researchers to help improve the lives or raise awareness for underrepresented communities. To navigate the site, user can use the dropdown menu and search a plethora of target areas, from specific practices to languages and product types. If the presets doesn't work, users can search the database by typing in the search field. This project was from my time at Byte Studios, and was using the in-house Byte CMS, which was built on PHP, jQuery, HTML and CSS at the time. I left Byte before this project was completed, so any information I have here is from my point in time developing the site.

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Technology Used:

HTML
CSS
JavaScript (ES 5)
PHP
Patterns (Byte Studios CMS proprietary)

Ideation

Background

The product needed to be an updated data base that holds many scholarly papers and resources for students, faculty and alumni.

Objective 1: Create a searchable repository for the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW). This would need to replace the older system, and have an emphasis on user-generated content.

Users need to create, delete entries to this repository. Have to provide the necessary forms and relevant fields.

Objective 2: Database of users

Users needed to be able to create an account, sign in, and be able to search, favorite, or create their own repos. This would be an open-source community.

Research

When developing, we had to take in account what the client hoped to achieve for this system and how much power we would give the users. Because users are primarily driving this experience, the dropdown tab is very responsive. When it is toggled on or off, it adjusts and reacts to content on the page.

Emphasis on user generated content.
A user interface that allows user to save collections as well as contribute to the repository

Iteration

Right when I was about to leave Byte Studios, we had a working build. It wasn't fully fleshed out, but users were able to create an account, sign in and out, and create repository. Here are a few screenshots of that build.

This is a view of the collections, showing the most recent. Within other details can be seen such as: description, product types and tags.

Here's the UI for users that are creating a new collection. As you can see, we made it as customizable as possible for the name and description. Product Types are listed as a preset and users are able to tick each one that they see fit.

Here's a final look at what a filled-out collection may look like. We streamlined the process to match the database we were using, with form validation on Dates, Years and required fields before a user can submit.

Summary

While I enjoyed developing this project, due to factors outside my control and scope creep, there was a bit of a disconnect in terms of communication with the client and our team. We had to adjust quite a few times and make edits. One of the things that the design didn't fully capture was the behavior of the search engine, as it was more than just a basic search engine that searches for terms. What the client wanted was for something really specific and responsive to focus area tags that we had not built before. Transitioning my code to the system's own code (it is designed to be under a CMS and uses PHP) had drastically changed the original code.

If I had complete autonomy over the project, I would have done it slightly different as one of the major challenges was converting the HTML files into PHP files and then using a template, which the code got a little overwhelming. I would have also opted to use a more modern JavaScript framework or library, as jQuery is quite outdated. I do not believe we even used jQuery to its full capacity, but the place I worked at my boss had his own CMS and probably wanted to connect it to the proprietary CMS. For a project this big, personally I would have used SASS and broke down my code more into components to keep the CSS in check and make things as modular as possible. However, I did enjoy working on the project and seeing the growth of it through its lifespan.

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