A full walkthrough of a typical multilayer media in the Media Viewer, demonstrating layer visibility toggling, the quiz mode, caption toggling, and zooming and panning.

AMBOSS Media Viewer

Not long after I’d started at AMBOSS, one of the editorial PM’s approached me about an idea the illustrators had had after hearing feedback that users wanted a deeper, more interactive studying experience for media. The information was already available: on a daily basis the illustrators produced rich illustrations full of layers and labels, but these were flattened for publishing to the existing viewer; could we provide an experience to users that delivers the depth of information that’s really there?

On its face it was a simple ask, but this meant taking original work out of Adobe Illustrator and Inkscape, annotating it in a consistent, machine-readable way, and serving it on the web, in addition to designing and developing the content management app needed to surface the experience.

I created a tool that lets illustrators upload and prepare an illustration step-by-step. The tool separates raster media out leaving just vertex placeholders which the service connects with a raster file of the appropriate size for the client device. It asks illustrators to connect labels of separate language sets with their corresponding indicators and highlight zones for quizzing, then lets them try the finished interactive illustration before deploying it to our cloud infrastructure.
A walkthrough of a typical radiological media, with a simple overlay layer.

I then worked with stakeholders on a testable design that would work for the wide scope of media types the Media Viewer would support. Once these low-fidelity designs were approved, I created the high-fidelity designs in a coded prototype which we tested internally. Once it was fully tested and production-ready, we shipped it.

Taking advantage of the now scalable design, we extended the Media Viewer to also work with other types of media the editors wanted to use throughout AMBOSS, like videos, microscopy with Google Maps-like zooming (provided by a third-party), and radiological images with labeled overlays.

The tool continues to be a productive avenue of new partnerships between AMBOSS and other didactic media providers. After release, user engagement with quizzable media was enthusiastic, growing with every release of an interactive illustration.