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The mobile app built by Rocket Farm Studios houses the world’s largest community of music writers and readers

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Discovery
Design
Develop
Grow
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Discovery

The Idea

Founded in 2005, SERMO started as a small virtual “doctor’s lounge” and has since grown into the largest social network for physicians in the US, with over 343,000 members and an expanding global presence. The Latin term Sermo means “conversation” or “discussion,” and the platform lives up to its name by providing a space where doctors from around the world can connect, collaborate, and share ideas.

“The goal of SERMO is to bring healthcare together globally,” explains Jamie Fernandes, VP of Product. “But it’s more than just Facebook for doctors. We wanted it to be a place where physicians could discuss politics affecting medicine, share cases they hadn’t encountered before, and collaborate across specialties.”

As part of its international expansion, SERMO recognized the need for a more mobile-centric approach. "We knew that in many countries, physicians primarily accessed the internet through mobile devices, so a mobile-first strategy was key,” says Fernandes. An existing app was in place, but it was outdated and didn’t meet the needs of a modern, social network-driven experience. To achieve their vision, SERMO needed a new app that would be central to their global growth, focusing on features like an activity feed to streamline engagement.

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Our Strategic Approach
The challenge was to collaborate with 5 different companies to create an app, accounting for sheet music, digital rights, and a store.
While determining how to translate a sheet music store and playback to the iPad, we faced several engineering challenges.

  • The Notestar app integrated Yamaha’s eCommerce engine with Noteflight’s Publishing Server, as well as the Digital Rights Management servers for Hal Leonard and MusicSales.
  • Rocket Farm had to utilize the signal processing capabilities of the iPad to handle pitch correction and tempo changes on the iPad in real-time, so users could speed up or slow down playback to match their own speed.
  • Finally, there was the graphics processing — the display of music scores with advanced animation of page-turning, all tightly synchronized with the playback of one or more audio tracks.
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Design

The Experience

The Experience

UI Design

Designing a mobile app for physicians presented unique challenges. “We wanted the app to feel familiar, like other social networks, but we also had to consider that physicians are used to more formal interfaces, like forms,” explains John Gurman, SVP of Technology. “It took a couple of months to nail down the design, but achieving full functionality took around six months due to the complexity of features.”

The new app introduced an activity feed that aggregated user-generated content, client-provided materials, and actionable items like surveys. This feature was critical in driving engagement and allowing physicians to participate in real-time discussions, vote on medical trends, and offer their expertise in return for honoraria. “The feed had to bridge the old world of formal forms with the new, more dynamic social media interactions physicians weren’t as familiar with,” says Fernandes.

Other key features included following popular posts, viewing comment threads, and participating in real-time medical polls. Ensuring responsiveness on mobile devices while managing a large volume of content was a challenge, but the team at Rocket Farm Studios worked closely with SERMO to overcome these hurdles.

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Rocket Farm provided a thoughtful and innovative process that got us through a lot of design challenges in a short time. Their work on NoteStar demonstrates the ability to create products that are smooth running, innovative, and well designed.”

- Joe Berkovitz CEO of Noteflight

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Development

Making it work

Making it work

The development phase required a flexible and adaptive approach, as the project’s scope frequently evolved. “This was a green field effort for us, meaning challenges popped up all the time,” says Fernandes. “Rocket Farm did a great job reacting to changes in requirements and scope. They quickly adapted, and we saw real progress as they partnered with us closely.”

One major task was integrating the activity feed, which aggregated a variety of content types while maintaining smooth, responsive performance across devices. Rocket Farm also ensured that the app could seamlessly support real-time voting and survey participation, as well as providing physicians with a way to earn honoraria through their expertise.

The player portion of the app handled scaling note sizes, allowing for changes in pitch and playback speed. The app had to support page-turning by both the user and the app when in playback mode.

There were also other unique interaction challenges: setting loop points to practice a section repeatedly, adding annotations to the score, and selecting different pitches. With all these , Rocket Farm undertook separate design phases.

The first was focused on the eCommerce store and the other on the playback experience. We actively tested user interactions as they were implemented. This approach was critical as these were ground-breaking features that required more than great paper designs, but the iterative incorporation of real user feedback to get it right.

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Rocket Farm Studios were extremely agile in how they presented and iterated on design – whether for the HTML5 store portion or the much more expressive set of interactions incorporated into the playback aspect of the app.”

- Joe Berkovitz CEO of Noteflight

Technology Used
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Native iOS and Android Development
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Real-time Content Aggregation
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Responsive Activity Feed
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Secure Voting & Survey Functionality
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Grow

Where are they now?

The SERMO app has become a vital tool in connecting physicians worldwide, enabling them to share knowledge and collaborate more effectively. The app continues to grow in functionality and reach, contributing to SERMO’s vision of creating a global community of healthcare professionals.

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