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Making the Capsular App
129 Plays22 hours ago
Miranda and Josh share the story behind creating Capsular — their new microlearning app designed for hand therapists. Tune in as they talk about the inspiration, challenges, and goals that shaped the app, and how it has the potential to change the way clinicians learn and grow in their practice.
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Transcript
Introduction and App Launch
00:00:05
josh MacDonald
Hi, I'm Josh McDonald.
00:00:06
Miranda Materi
And I'm Miranda Materia and we are Hand Therapy Academy.
00:00:10
josh MacDonald
So we just launched this Capsular app. It was a big project for us over the course of a year. And we thought it might be kind of fun for you guys to hear the journey that it got us here. Like it was at the very end of ASHT of last year, all the way up until this year.
Development Timeline and Challenges
00:00:24
josh MacDonald
So it's kind of a long journey for us.
00:00:26
Miranda Materi
Yeah, and when we started, i had no idea this project would take a year, right? I was thinking, I mean, I know usually things take a little bit longer than we think they will. so I was thinking maybe six months. and we would I knew the content would take a while, but I thought the app itself would be up and running much sooner.
00:00:42
Miranda Materi
Is that what you thought too?
00:00:44
josh MacDonald
Yeah, yeah. So we went through like an exploratory process. I had been trying to make better use of my screen time. So I downloaded this app, Canoe, Kate, like I forgot how to spell it. It's a history app and you go and you pick different eras and you learn little things about history, then it quizzes you. And it was fun.
00:00:58
josh MacDonald
And I thought, you know, we could do this with hand therapy stuff um while I was headed towards ASHT. So i shot Miranda the idea. And usually Miranda's one that comes up with the crazy ideas, um but not this time.
00:01:09
josh MacDonald
Nope.
00:01:09
Miranda Materi
This one was by far the craziest, I think.
00:01:11
josh MacDonald
this This is for sure. And she loved the idea, thought it was
Technical and Design Hurdles
00:01:15
josh MacDonald
great. So we ran it by our IT guy and said, what would it take to do this? Like, is this even feasible? And it was at the beginning of October last year. And so I asked him, hey, could we do this by October?
00:01:26
josh MacDonald
And I meant of 2025. And he thought I meant in four weeks. And he said, no, you can't do this in four weeks. But he started kind of looking into it and and thought, yeah, this is doable.
00:01:37
josh MacDonald
It's barely doable. Barely.
00:01:39
Miranda Materi
Barely. Yeah.
00:01:41
josh MacDonald
Yeah.
00:01:41
Miranda Materi
And so there were several obstacles. There was like the technical ah obstacles, right? Like just getting in the Apple store, who knew that was going to be such a challenge. And um also the challenge of figuring about like, how do we want it to look? How do we want it to interact with people? Right. There are so many steps. And I think Josh and i neither of us had an experience in app creation, right. Or to app design. So We were lucky enough to find a great designer.
00:02:09
Miranda Materi
And also we have our amazing IT guy who happens to be very brilliant.
00:02:14
josh MacDonald
Yes. Yes. And the design process was both fun and a little daunting. And that took quite a while too. I would say that took a couple of months to get through. Like you have to pick a color scheme. You have to pick a logo. You have to pick ah the vibe that you want with it.
00:02:28
josh MacDonald
And then once you have all of that on like a mood board, then you have to go plug that into like, what is this page going to look like in this page? And then you have to have a flow. What happens after you do this? Well, what if they get the question wrong? What if they get it wrong, but want to go back and review the content and every decision has to have a pathway after it.
00:02:46
josh MacDonald
So was as much the design as it was planning the the flow of the app itself. And so that was both a learning process. We knew early on, we didn't have the capacity to make this look better than a fourth grader. So we hired a designer.
00:02:59
josh MacDonald
She was fantastic. She did a great job, but it was a side gig for her. So that kind of added some delay to it. So yeah, that was part of it of the adventure too.
00:03:07
Miranda Materi
Yeah. And so the design, and I think jo Josh and I did this for hand therapy Academy as well, but we always start with who's our avatar or who's like, who's going to be consuming this app. Is it an older male? Is it a younger female? So we, we have to first figure out who our avatar is, our ideal client.
00:03:25
Miranda Materi
And then we kind of work backwards from
Content Creation and Legalities
00:03:27
Miranda Materi
there, right? Like what does, and that's where our designer really helped. Like, and I think she was probably more along the lines of our avatar. So that helped as well.
00:03:35
josh MacDonald
Yeah. Yeah. And so once we had the design done, we while that was happening, we were busy furiously writing a whole bunch of these, of all the content, everything you need to know for hand therapy.
00:03:48
josh MacDonald
Well, that's a lot of stuff. And when you start to break down this structure and this hierarchy, there's so much content to write. Everything about peripheral nerves, everything about ulnar-sided wrist pain, making sure every topic and angle is covered.
00:04:00
josh MacDonald
We spent Oh gosh, what did you Marina? Probably 20, 30 hours per chapter writing content, something like that?
00:04:06
Miranda Materi
Yeah, maybe longer on some of them.
00:04:07
josh MacDonald
Yeah, yeah.
00:04:09
Miranda Materi
And I think the thing that was really important to Josh and myself was to make sure we had quality content. So it wasn't just like, you know, we could sit down and recollect everything about a flexor tendon, right?
00:04:22
Miranda Materi
It's like we're diving into the literature, what's new, right?
00:04:22
josh MacDonald
Yeah.
00:04:26
Miranda Materi
And really like making sure we have good resources and references for citing what we're saying. And then after we you know come up with that snippet of information, it's making a good quiz quiz question, right? And there's an art to making good quiz questions.
00:04:39
josh MacDonald
Yeah, absolutely. And even like the images, because every capsule has either a video where we explain things or the images.
00:04:43
Miranda Materi
Oh, yes.
00:04:46
josh MacDonald
And we have to make sure all of our content is original and we're not copyright infringing on things or plagiarizing things. that the images we get are not just off of Google, right? Like that's plagiarism. And someone who made that could come back and say, that's mine and you get sued. So we either had to get it off of like licensed stuff off of shutterstock.
00:05:06
josh MacDonald
Good luck finding shutterstock images for a four core suture strand type. Or we had to make them ourselves. A lot of them, um we used photos for things that we would set up photo,
00:05:17
josh MacDonald
things, uh, photo studios for sometimes it was asking my daughter who's in graphic design to make things. And sometimes it was us sketching things out. So the whole image thing took this whole extra part to it too.
00:05:28
Miranda Materi
did It did. really took a big part. And, you know, as much as we wanted animation with some of the stuff, we realized early on that that was not going to be feasible. It was hard enough getting the appropriate image for it.
00:05:39
josh MacDonald
Yeah. Yeah. and And making images that, you know, we like to think we have a reputation for having clean and easy to understand images and things that make sense um and are appealing to our audience. And that's hard to do when you're talking about all these varieties of topics. And sometimes there isn't a great image for pain.
00:05:59
josh MacDonald
There isn't a great image for, so it's coming up with what would this look like and yeah, and setting it all up. For hundreds, thousands of vignettes that I think we have now when when we do the count, i think we're over a thousand different capsules of these things. Yeah.
00:06:12
Miranda Materi
Right. And it's also not like I think another thing we ran into thinking you can't just take an image from a textbook and cite it. Right.
00:06:19
josh MacDonald
Yeah.
00:06:19
Miranda Materi
um I think, you know, that's fine with some if you're doing a paper for school or something, if you're citing it. But when you're using something as a business, it's definitely gets into some gray territory.
00:06:31
Miranda Materi
So.
00:06:31
josh MacDonald
Yeah. Yeah. And to ask for permission, know, images with permission is daunting to find these authors and then it's illegal things and maybe they don't want to get, so we just come up with our own images sometimes easier than tracking down authors and yeah, coming up with original content. Yeah.
Final Preparations and Launch
00:06:47
Miranda Materi
Yeah. And then there was another part of it that I think we might have, like I forgot about it until we were talking is I remember even talking to an attorney about what is appropriate to write, what should we, you know, can, what type of images.
00:06:55
josh MacDonald
Yeah.
00:07:00
Miranda Materi
So I think we, you know, I'm glad we did that looking back because we set ourselves up for success, hopefully. if, and um, so no one can come back and say, Hey, that's my image or, um, you know, we're, we're doing it by the book for sure.
00:07:11
josh MacDonald
Yeah. Yeah.
00:07:14
josh MacDonald
Yeah. And then we got to submitting, we wrote all this content.
00:07:17
Miranda Materi
Bye.
00:07:19
josh MacDonald
Our, our it guy is doing a fantastic job of populating this great designed app. And then we go to the Google play in the Apple store and they say, we don't like any of this. You have to switch it entirely. So he had to redesign a ton of it and the flow was different. We had all these recorded images for social media posts and he says, I'm sorry, I have to change a bunch of that stuff.
00:07:38
josh MacDonald
And so we can have fill the blank questions because old Android devices can't figure out how to work with that. So we just had all these changes. We finally get approval. And then, gosh, I think it was three days before our hard deadline of October 23rd, Thursday of the conference, when we're supposed to put this up on devices and show it off.
00:07:50
Miranda Materi
Mm-hmm.
00:07:57
josh MacDonald
And the network, the Amazon AWS network globally shuts down. They shut down Facebook and news agencies and Snapchat and $100 billion, dollars I think is what they estimated, would be lost.
00:08:09
josh MacDonald
And we lost 48 hours of working time getting ready for this. So instead of having, think we were planning to have seven chapters ready at launch. We only had four just because the world shut down almost like all the network stuff. So it was just this, you know, it's if it's going to be there, it's going to be there.
00:08:25
Miranda Materi
and Yeah, quite a journey. And then we're still looking to add features in. I think um one recommendation by our IT guy was just do baby steps at a time, get it up, test it, make sure it's running.
00:08:37
Miranda Materi
And then we can add in that next detail as opposed to trying to do everything at once, which, you know, i think Josh and I were like, dang it, that'd be a cool feature.
00:08:40
josh MacDonald
you
00:08:44
Miranda Materi
We want it now. um But I think it was very wise on his part and based on all the um probably have to get it up and going and then add in as we can.
00:08:53
josh MacDonald
Yeah. Once it's up, you can do almost anything you want to because it's officially approved. So we can make all kinds of changes. So we'll be letting people know, hey, update now. There's a new chapter. There's a new feature. We're tracking streaks differently. The homepage looks different because we couldn't use the homepage our designer came up with until we have more chapters. So things going added quickly.
00:09:13
josh MacDonald
We just all needed to take a deep breath after the panic of the last three months coming into October 23rd. It's like, listen, it it's got to be there. It has to be there. So, and we made it, we made it just fine.
00:09:23
Miranda Materi
Yep.
00:09:23
josh MacDonald
And all the stress wasn't really necessary.
00:09:24
Miranda Materi
Yep.
00:09:26
Miranda Materi
yeahp We made it, but we had a backup plan.
00:09:28
josh MacDonald
Yeah. Yeah. We did have some backup plans what we're going to do at the convention. If we, if, ah if we didn't have it available, we had bought some ah extra things to make it just a hand therapy Academy booth, which is fine. But fortunately we were able to have the capsular stuff too.
00:09:42
Miranda Materi
Very cool.
00:09:42
josh MacDonald
Yeah. Yeah. So that's just a little bit of the journey of what it takes to make an app. It was 12 months, a lot of stress and an awful lot of work hours, but hopefully it's something that you guys enjoy. um You can find it on the app stores of your phone. Just go type in the word capsular pops up. You get a free week's trial to try it out.
00:09:59
josh MacDonald
um And then you can decide if you want to do it monthly or yearly, depending on what you're what you're looking to do. So if you have any questions, reach out to us on info at handtherapyacademy.com, or you can send us messages on any social media platform at Hand Therapy Academy.