Our client, Pharma*, is a renowned healthcare company that had recently implemented a Scientific Content Portal for Healthcare Professionals. The business team challenged us to gain deeper insights into the platform's audience and enhance the website accordingly, in addition to develop a new feature dedicated to medical events, which is currently a vital interaction point between the company and healthcare professionals.
The Context
Pharma Pro* is a Latam platform for Healthcare Professionals from a renowned global pharmaceutical company.
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Confidentiality
In order to protect the interests of the company, the company identity will remain confidential, and some data will be distorted or concealed.
Challenge
Redesign Pharma Pro Scientific Content Portal for Health Care Professionals
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Goals:
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To better understand the platform's audience and their interests.
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To create a feature focused on events.
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To redesign the platform to align with medical expectations and thereby increase access and engagement.
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Team:
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Lead Designer | Thaís Petry
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Senior UI Designer | Thadeu Brandão
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UI Designer | Celso da Silva
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Intern | Daiane Beloto
The Process
The team followed a four-step design process of immersion, ideation, prototyping, and validation.
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Immersion & Ideation
Assumptions
We kicked off the project by gathering insights on the product with the data and business teams. Two main findings can be highlighted:
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The average visit lasted less than a minute and a half.
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Almost no users returned to the platform.
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After accessing the platform logged areas and evaluating our initial findings, we started the project with a few hypotheses to be investigated:
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The current content is not engaging.
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The way the content is presented is not appealing.
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Adding event features to the platform will increase user returns.
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With these defined hypotheses, we sought answers and validations in each tool applied.
Customer Interviews
The design team conducted 20 interviews using a semi-structured approach to gain a comprehensive understanding of the unique needs and identify potential opportunities across various medical specialties and regions.
20
interviews
03
languages
05
countries
05
specialties
02
weeks
45
insights
Competitive Analysis
We conducted a market analysis to gain insights into industry standards by examining direct competitors (pharmaceutical companies) and companies mentioned previously in interviews. See our key findings below:
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✓ Content: The pharmaceutical companies offer many different learning formats such as courses, podcasts, media apps, and content trails. They visually prioritize the search features for navigation.
✓ Engagement: Competitors offer features such as latest science news, diagnosis and image challenges, online conferences, and use many different social media strategies to keep users engaging with the platform.
✓ Events: Pharmaceutical websites offer event calendars and online attendance, but lack user journeys for administrative tasks like speaker contracts and logistics.
Personas
Based on the Customer Interviews, desk research and studies of previous studies from the Business Team, we set up one persona highlighting main behaviors, preferences and pain points. We referred to it throughout the entire development process.
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Usability and Heuristics
An analysis of the platform's usability was conducted to identify strengths and areas for improvement.
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Main issues:
✓ Correspondence between the system and the real world: Many items on the main navigation menu were unfamiliar to physicians as they were created within the company, such as "Medical letters," "HAAP," and "Market Access Education."
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✓ Minimalist aesthetic and design: Despite the use of institutional colors, the portal featured mostly text-heavy screens with many buttons, making navigation tiring.
User Data
Studies were conducted to understand current behavior and patterns within the platform through heatmap and videos of user behavior via Clarity.
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Main issues:
✓ Extremely slow performance and lack of clear indication of loading time led users to errors while registering.
✓ CTAs: Exchanged error messages and inconsistencies, as well as poor performances on long registration form pages.
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✓ The site's navigability appears to lack intuitiveness, and the current content does not seem engaging enough to retain visitors.
Value Proposition
A value proposition was developed after the research and interviews to highlight the platform's unique value and benefits to the user.
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Pharma Pro helps physicians, 

Who need credible information about Pharma products and therapies, 

By providing easy access to up-to-date official information about Pharma products and therapies,

Unlike Pubmed, Medscape, NEJM and other pharmaceutical scientific content portals.
Workshops
The team conducted two workshops:
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1. We first presented the user journey and events' personas, refining everything with the company's events team. We also conducted a design critique session, discussing and validating all screens and actions.
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2. In the second workshop, the participants discussed the risks and prerequisites of each stage of the flow and prioritized them as the next focus of the design team and development.
Prototype & Validation
Card Sorting
To ensure intuitive navigation and simplify complex menu items naming, the design team employed card sorting techniques with physicians.
Design Critique
To discuss the viability of the new designs, a series of design critique sessions were conducted with the squad teams.
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Usability Tests
Usability tests were carried out with real users through video calls and screen sharing to evaluate the effectiveness of the redesigned platform, especially focused on events.
AB Tests
A series of AB Tests were planned in order to validate improvements in a real environment with data support.
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MVP
The design team organized a series of meetings in order to discuss delivery waves and estimate technical effort with T-shirt sizes with technical and business teams.
OKRs
We introduced and guided the client in using OKRs. We facilitated workshops with the product team to define objectives, results, and activities, including:
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The redesign is still in development
Only the first MVP delivery wave was implemented so far and small improvements from AB Tests