Shiken

An innovative company providing education tools for medical students, including a revision app.

Achieved with CookiesHQ since May 2017

7
registered examiners
16,500+
uploaded questions
50
products created

Providing training to healthcare professionals

At the beginning of 2017, the Shiken team were planning their first venture. Some team members had spent years revising for their medical exams and found the experience boring and time-consuming. After researching existing revision services, they realised many of the new online tools were limited in value and didn’t have the ability to scale beyond a certain subject.

In response, they came up with Shiken – an online test prep marketplace where users can purchase free and premium content from educational publishers. The aim for the app is to provide the best revision experience for students, as quickly and conveniently as possible. The Shiken team had the core system ready but needed a development team to create the store and connect with Amazon Alexa.

“The Cookies team have been fantastic in speeding up our development process for Shiken. The team are a delight to work with, are reliable and fast and were able to quickly adapt to our existing codebase while adding new features.”
Alexander Young, Founder & CEO of Meddicle

Getting to know the business

The development of the Shiken marketplace required us to get to know and understand the business in detail through a series of discovery workshops. We worked closely with the Shiken team, initially to identify what users would require of the platform, and then to prototype various approaches to the marketplace.

We developed an early MVP version of Shiken with core features and presented it to early adopters as fast as possible. We used customer feedback to identify unnecessary features that we could remove and missing features that we needed to develop. Through an iterative process that continues to this day, we are able to improve, test and refine Shiken into a product that its users actually want and need.

We then moved on to our next project – the Shiken Alexa Skill.

Skills are voice-driven Alexa capabilities. They’re like apps – you can enable and disable them, and use them to create a more personalised experience when you speak to Alexa, Amazon’s voice service.

We spent a couple of months getting familiar with Alexa through our own office Echo device. Once we had discovered its patterns and limitations, we knew an Alexa Skill would be the perfect accompaniment to Shiken’s web platform. We got to work creating the Skill and launched in July 2018.

With the Shiken Skill, students of the platform can now study by asking Alexa to ‘Start Shiken’ and answering questions out loud. Team Shiken have a clear understanding of what they want to achieve and realistic ideas of what can be accomplished. We’re very excited for the future of the app!

Technologies used: Ruby on Rails, Stripe, Amazon Web Services, Alexa Skills