One of the final deliverables for a refreshed interactive pharmaceutical rep experience app
When designing digital products for pharmaceutical brands there are a multitude of touchpoints to consider. What's a physician's experience with the brand when first learning about it on the web? What about in their office? What about when they're prescribing the drug, or attempting to give directions to safely use the drug? And that's just for the physicians - multiply these scenarios by the experiences of patients, pharmacists, nurses and caregivers and the complexity of developing appropriate experiences across every touchpoint becomes apparent.
With so many touchpoints for marketing teams to consider, it's not a surprise that some experiences suffer from lack of precision. That's especially true in the realm of the "rep call," where pharma sales representatives armed with interactive iPad applications head into a doctor's office and attempt to explain the ins-and-outs of a drug to physicians. The interactive apps that the reps use are supposed to function as invaluable tools to help drive conversation and reference important information, but in practice the apps are often so chock-full of information and difficult to navigate that reps don't use them at all.
I found the interactive applications reps were using to sell Amgen's drug Enbrel in a similar, sprawling, place when I began working on the brand in 2016. As lead user experience designer across a series of projects I lead the charge to modernize their offerings with new applications that:
1) Reimagined interactive visual aids as tools for quick encounters with physicians
2) Emphasized conversational interaction over dull, one-sided presentations
3) Improved ease-of-use by focusing on usability fundamentals
The Challenge: Tools Designed to Do the Wrong Job
The first step to designing any application is learning about the context in which it will be used. In this case I had the benefit of some knowledge of the pharmaceutical sales process thanks to time spent shadowing physicians in undergrad, a network of friends working as physicians & pharma reps, and background information gathered by speaking with people from my company who were lucky enough to go on ride-alongs with reps. Some defining insights I gathered about the sales process:
•Physicians are extremely busy! Most sales calls are very short, lasting about two minutes (or a distracted lunch if representatives are lucky).
•Physicians, rightfully, see themselves as the experts. They're unlikely to trust information from sales representatives.
•If a tool is difficult to use reps will ditch it. Many reps prefer to talk to physicians directly when the alternative is fumbling with a confusing aid.
Unfortunately, the tools given to reps to help sell to physicians often completely disregard these realities. Take, for example, the architecture of one fairly typical, existing application I've worked on in an executional role:
This application is, for the most part, structured as a simple flip book, but with a hidden, interactive menu to jump through the story. If this were a literal book it would weigh-in at about 50 full pages of main story, and all that with many more pages of hidden references! This application seems to be built for a perfect (marketing) world in which sales representatives can sit down with silent health care providers for multiple hours and walk them through a brand's entire marketing story piece-by-piece.
Unfortunately for the reps carrying this application, that perfect world doesn't exist - and the irony of creating an app to answer any question is it ends up answering none. A study conducted by one agency in 2015 put the percentage of reps opening their interactive sales aids at least once per month at just 71%. That's right, about 30% of representatives are so put off by the applications their companies are spending millions to produce that they're literally never opening them.
The dissatisfaction with the apps doesn't stop with the sales reps. The same study revealed that physicians too had app issues. It shouldn't be surprising that a desire for increased "Brevity and Relevance" topped the list of physician's suggested improvements.
The Solution: Part 1 - Selling Stakeholders on a New Approach
With all the facts outlined above the problem (bulky experiences) was well defined in my mind, but implementing a solution would still be difficult thanks to the practically institutionalized nature of app design at pharmaceutical advertising agencies. On a typical project at my agency the user experience team is brought into the process well after content is decided - it's an issue that you're just not going to be able to work around if the problem is too much content! So, just to get a project where we might be able to begin to chip away at the underlying issue, I had to employ some skills that might not be the first to come to mind on a straightforward UX project: evangelism, persuasion, and project planning.
My solution started with evangelism. As a UX designer at my agency I work with many different creative teams and account executives who work across different brands. Since these people manage so many different types of content I first had to show them that a problem existed with the sales rep apps. To do so I kept close tabs on research coming from other agencies, best practices, and my own conversations with physicians and sales reps. Periodically I sent research and quotes out via email to account executives and brand teams who might have the opportunity to discuss a different kind of app with a client.
Secondly, I worked to persuade clients directly. Whenever I presented architecture or wireframes to clients I mentioned alternative approaches during the course of presentations. These were usually brought up as next steps for future versions of apps toward the end of presentations so that we could upsell further work instead of knocking the work we'd already done.
Eventually these efforts paid off when one pair of account executives emerged willing to try a new approach. The client, Amgen, had a brand, Enbrel, which has been on the market for years and had established a good working relationship with our account team. Amgen also had a larger than normal sales rep presence around decision makers. As such, the account team was able to push the client to try something new, as a pilot. From there I worked with the account and project management team to envision a new process for this pilot. The process:
•Bypassed architecture development with the understanding that we'd create very simple apps.
•Gave a little extra time to sketching, wireframing and prototyping to allow us to devote attention to creating a variety of innovative solutions
• Did not include development time - this was optional based on the client's thoughts on the wireframes and whether they bought into the new philosophy.
The Solution: Part 2 - Crafting Memorable, Conversational Experiences
Now that we had the go-ahead it was finally time (phew!) to get to the fun stuff - creating new experiences! With so many brand and creative experts available at the agency, and client buy-in on the big idea, this was fairly quick and painless and can be summed up in three steps: 1. Brainstorming 2. Building & Iterating and 3. Presenting
1. Brainstorming
At a creative agency brainstorms are our forte, and this wasn't my first rodeo. To get the process started I set up a few meetings to assemble subject matter experts, interaction designers, and developers to think through how to approach the problem. I believe gathering all these people helps to build teamwide ownership and the best range of solutions through shared expertise. Together we defined key value messages we wanted reps to be able to communicate, discussed the importance of the branding campaign, presented visual interactive trends from other successful apps and talked through the ideal experiences rep might have within our new approach.
From there I lead a few sketch sessions and helped guide the fundamentally print-focused creative team to more interactive and memorable locales. We began with simple visual metaphors - might images turn into a chart with the press of a button? What if we allowed users to interact with the app and guess how many people they think might be afflicted with the disease? What if we relied on the particulars of the technology afforded to us - could the app use a gyroscope? At the conclusion of the brainstorm we used stickers to vote for the best and most achievable app ideas and chose four that we'd like to present to the account team for review after a little clean-up.
The creative team brought images from their ad campaign, which centered on showing physicians all the activities people perform with their hands. They also brought statistics about how Enbrel could allow patients to keep use of their hands longer than alternative means of treatment. Initial suggestions focused on visual solutions like having these images form a chart.
2. Building and Iterating
Over a few days I used Axure to build out all our solutions to the appropriate levels of fidelity needed to express our ideas to laymen. In one case this meant drawing simple gray boxes that would change in size after a user interacted with a draggable area, in another users could simply tap through pictures, in a third I had to zoom out to show how users would be able to move the iPad itself to interact with the application. When creating interactive prototypes like these I always keep font size, button size and how navigation will work in mind to ensure all experiences will be usable no matter how simple or complicated they might sound conceptually.
Once the prototypes were complete I presented them back to the creative team along with the account managers. I believe being willing to present high quality but unfinished work to creative team members and stakeholders is key to ensuring all aspects of a solution have been stress tested before moving forward with a final product.
I used Axure to create a variety of prototypes to help explain the ideas that came out of our sketch sessions. Here some simple animation was enough to demonstrate the quick interaction the creative team envisioned using to emphasize that individual patients contributed to the whole. Later I presented this prototype to the client and shared the link to allow them to let their sales reps test out the various prototypes.
3. Presentation
Finally, after a few refinements, the prototypes were ready for presentation to the client. I began the presentation with expectation setting - what should the audience be looking to understand about these prototypes? From there I summarized the key differences they'd see in each prototype, and that the prototypes would progress from rep-driven quick-hitting presentations to engaging, HCP-driven experiences. During the presentation of each solution I made sure to describe pros and cons of a given option - speed comes at the expense of novelty. Engagement comes at the expense of control, and so on. At the conclusion of the presentation we passed along a powerpoint deck with brief descriptions and links to each prototype, all designed for the client to easily navigate in their own time.
Throughout the prototypes I used clear blue buttons and links to communicate interaction points. These allowed the client to understand and operate the lo-fidelity versions of the apps. Here users can interact with the blue buttons and links to see how a quiz will work.
The Results - User Satisfaction, More Work, Continued Innovation
After the presentation of the new proposed experiences the client took the interactive prototypes back to their internal panel of sales reps for review - the moment of truth. A few days later we received word that the prototypes were such a hit that their sales team couldn't choose just one - they wanted this type of thinking carried through to more apps! Before we could even show off a full, high-fidelity application the new approach already looked like a hit with users. In the following weeks the successes continued to pile up for the agency:
•Amgen immediately opened multiple new projects with the agency with the aim of carrying through the innovative new approach. This equates to hundreds of thousands of dollars of new income for the agency (with more similar projects likely on the way).
•Select interactive prototypes were inserted into pitch decks to demonstrate a new way to approach sales aids and played a role in helping the agency win more work.
•The new process for creation of smaller, interactive sales aids has resulted in many more small, manageable jobs for the team - and has allowed for creation of more innovative sales aids. Videos from a small sampling of these projects are below.
One of our most ambitious ideas placed an iPad into a physician's hands and allowed them to move the iPad around to explore a grid of their patients' points of view. At set movement intervals pieces of the grid flip to present key data points in the course of their natural experience. Instructions were built into this prototype to ensure the client would understand how to interact with it.
This prototype was created for a new project that opened as a result of the initial pilot. Here, after the physician makes their guess an actual percentage and more messaging is revealed to help drive further conversation. A hi-fidelity draft of this mockup is seen at the top of this portfolio piece.
This prototype was created for another new project that opened thanks to the new approach. Here a parallax effect is used to show physicians all the activities patients wills till be able to take part in with help from Enbrel. Data is accessible quickly at any time within the course of the experience.
At AbelsonTaylor I was responsible for creating app architectures, leading brainstorms, and prototyping. I would then give visual and development feedback throughout the rest of the process to get the apps to their final polished states.