Designer's Reference App

IOS and Android Native Mobile

Instructional Design Guru is a reference and job aid for practitioners who design learning experiences and students studying instructional design. It was conceived, designed, and developed by Simple Useful Tools. You can find several screenshots in the app stores:

• iTunes Store
• Google Play

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Global Public Health

Design, Drupal, Mapping

The Johns Hopkins University Center for Clinical Global Health Education was unhappy with their older public-facing website. It was based on a legacy platform, had a distinctly dated look, and had never been architected for user experience. It was also completely disconnected from the Center's distance learning course system and housed on a legacy server. Simple Useful Tools, through a referral, was contacted for a comprehensive solution. Our solution was a Drupal website designed and built from the ground up, using PHP scripts to migrate the existing content to the Drupal platform on a new dedicated server. See the Moodle entry in this portfolio for details on our integration of their online course system with the public-facing site.

To provide a way to visually and interactively drill down into the Center's global activities, we created a custom Interactive Map. In addition, SUT implemented a faceted advanced search feature. Now that our client's mission and organizational activities have grown, SUT was recently selected to implement a complete revision of the information architecture and presentation for the site.

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Medical Data Standards

Design, Drupal, Wiki

The MedBiquitous organization hired SUT to redesign their entire web presence, consisting of a legacy website and a Confluence wiki. In addition they needed to vacate the borrowed server they were using at the time. SUT created alternative design mockups and subsequently developed a Drupal website from one of these designs. We wrote scripts to migrate content from the old website to the Drupal instance on a new Linux server. The wiki software was installed and configured on a Tomcat Java application server, and the wiki database was migrated to MySQL. This was all achieved with zero downtime.

SUT was subsequently hired to retrofit the theme to work on mobile screen sizes. We also perform technical maintenance and site updates for the yearly MedBiq conference.

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HIV/AIDS Prevention

Design, Drupal

The John's Hopkins School of Nursing received grands from the health departments of the city of Baltimore and state of Maryland for informing at-risk communities about the benefits of certain drugs for the prevention of HIV infection . It was especially important that the site work well on mobile devices. Based on a referral, they entrusted Simple Useful Tools with building a website to support the campaign.

Working with the Johns Hopkins personnel, SUT designed a strikingly unusual use of the common image slider that would grab the attention of certain at-risk communities. The site is fully responsive to screen size. It features an interactive provider finder that allows a user to get a list of providers sorted by distance from any given address in the state. This site can be found at PrEP Maryland.

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Autism Education and Community

Design, Drupal, Migration

The Interactive Autism Network, an arm of the Kennedy-Krieger Institute, is a website for supporting research and building community among persons on the autism spectrum and their families. IAN had a legacy website but were unhappy with the look, layout, and ease of content modification. They wanted a contemporary and attractive appearance for their community website and, at the same time, a migration from their legacy server, which would no longer be supported. IAN had many ideas for highlighting their own featured content and also wanted to display feeds from other Autism information sites. Simple Useful Tools produced alternative designs and subsequently built a Drupal website on a new VPS server, satisfying all of IAN's needs.

SUT was subsequently hired to retrofit the new site for responsive design and performs updates and other maintenance to this day.

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Science Collaboration

Design, Drupal, Groups

LEAP Resources, funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, was designed and built from the ground up on the Drupal platform by Simple Useful Tools. The website is an information portal and collaboration tool suite for researchers in the field of Long Acting/Extended Release Anti-retroviral drug development.

The public facing side gives scientists and patients alike a broad presentation of the ongoing state of research in this field and provides a forum for questions. It is fully responsive to all screen sizes. The highly interactive private side uses a group infrastructure to allow participating scientists to form sections on the site for different aspects of their research activities. Site users may request or be invited to join one or more group/sections. The sections each have their own content visibility and access rules. A social-media like activity stream is automatically generated on both a site and group basis. This site is new, but the principle investigators are happy with what they see.

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Non-profit Organizations

Custom forms, Reports

Black Saga Competition website is now defunct but it was a website and administrative tool programmed by Simple Useful Tools to support in-school and regional contests in African-American history. Schools register their coordinators and participants and pay their fee for each year's competition. The administrative pages can not be seen by the public, but many complex forms were created for this completely custom PHP website. Pictured here is the form for posting the year's regional winners after the final competition. The left menu shows the many other functions available to administrators.

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Custom Certificates

Image processing, PDF Generation, Reports, Statistics

The Johns Hopkins Center for Clinical Global Health Education (CCGHE) delivers CD based medical education to healthcare workers in resource-limited countries because reliable Internet service is not always availabile. Therefore, they had a need to provide the important certificates for these courses outside of their web-based platform, Moodle. A user had to prove he or she took the CD based course(s) before a certificate would be issued and also the correct certificate had to be available for the course. CCGHE once again asked Simple Useful Tools for help.

We began by writing a desktop Java program that would insert a unique verification code and course id into the code for the course quiz. Upon passing the course, the user is presented with a pop-up containing the verification code, and a link to the Certificates website. This completely custom PHP website requests the user's verification code and course id. The appropriate certificate is displayed and available for PDF download, printing, or emailed PDF.

Most of this requires logging in, but pictured is the certificate builder which allows the admin user to upload graphics to build the certificate, and enter text lines to populate it. The correct certificate is added in real-time from the user's entered course id. It was a very interesting project!

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Distance Medical Education

Moodle, Single sign-on, Migration

When Johns Hopkins CCGHE needed a platform for their distance education courses, they turned to Simple Useful Tools for advice. We suggested the Learning Management System (LMS) Moodle. We created a custom Moodle theme to mirror their Drupal portal site and created a single sign-on from that site to the Moodle site. Users register and log in via the portal site and with a course click are automatically registered as Moodle users and subsequently logged into Moodle. You can see the Moodle public pages here: CCGHE Online Courses. SUT continues to perform Moodle updates and other maintenance to this day.

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