UX Project: Global Pharmaceutical Company

Helping to structure and carry out agile processes to deliver ongoing user friendly products while ensuring the business value

CLIENT

Global pharmaceutical company, May 2020 – Aug 2021

MY ROLE

Agile dev., user research, mockups & prototypes, usability testing

CHALLENGE

The potential for developing new and innovative products across the organization was building up, and the client was reaching out to get a UX Consultant that could build a foundation for involving users in their new way of developing products. Additionally, as the agile setup was new, it was key to build a solid relation and understanding between the product team, the users and the stakeholders.

The primary challenges that was found in all use cases was the lack of proactively utilizing the data at their disposal. Therefore solutions were build around bringing data to life and finding ways to improve their results.

THE PROCESS: AGILE DEVELOPMENT

I have been a part of the kickoff their new agile way of working as a UX Consultant. All products starting point was a look into desirability, viability and feasibility. All three elements needed to be realistic before the project would be kicked off.

My role was to include users throughout the development phase – from the initial testing of a hypothesis via user interviews, initial wireframes and mockups, second round of interviews leading to a prototype that we used for further interviews and usability testing. I had ongoing dialogues with stakeholders, users, product owner and developers in order to make sure that we kept on developing on functionalities and features that would be valuable for both users and the core business. Additionally, I had to make sure we found creative compromises and dividing everything into MVP-features and what were more nice-to-have features. We were able to launch the MVP after only 8 weeks. With a focus on value drivers, we continued to launch something new each time it could minimize e.g. time, risk, resources etc. Throughout the development of new tools, my role was also to inspire and prove the value of continuous focus on UX.

WHAT ARE WE GOING TO BUILD?

The projects all started off with an exploration into who our users were, what was the hypothesis we wanted to test out, what value drivers were we working to achieve.

I created an interview guide to lead the first interviews with a focus on getting to know the users’ existing workflows. We would seek to understand their challenges and opportunities they experienced before discussing potential solutions.

Some of the main questions I was curious to ask was:

Can you please take me through the typical process of working with this tool?
What do you see as the most challenging part in that process? 
What are the most common errors or risks you experience? 
How are you imagining a new tool or system that could improve this to look like? What can you do?

Even though we sought to be completely open and non-biased in our initial interviews, we already had some hypothesis and assumptions from our Product Owner – and we wanted to test these out before the first line of code is written. Therefore, if the user didn’t bring up some of the subjects that we had assumptions about, we would ask more direct questions to make sure we got everything covered. This way we could test out the desirability of a new tool before spending our budget and resources on investigating the viability and feasibility. With all the gathered research we could now safely move into the define-phase.

DEFINE & IDEATION

With all information gathered from interviews, we were able to align on who our primary users were, map out how their workflow is and where they experience the pain points.

With all this in place, we could start the idea generator. We wanted to ideate on the functionalities within the tool and how they each could benefit the overall goal. At the same time it was important for me to keep these prioritized, so we always knew what was more crucial than others. Start off with the basic and key information so the users can perform and succeed to complete the intended workflow. Later on, we can add functionalities or enhance the User Interface to become more and more user friendly.

Examples of mockups from Project #1:

WIREFRAMES, MOCKUPS & PROTOTYPES

I would start the process of visualizing the most important functionalities needed for the developers to build the skeleton of the tool. The easiest way for me to get started on the creative puzzle of getting all ends to meet, I always start sketching with pen and paper. This was valuable for myself so I from the start make sure I create a design that has room for all elements and that it is easy scalable (if needed). As we have been working remotely, I do quick wireframes in Sketch or Figma to be able to share this to my teammates. As they are the expert on the subject I wanted, as soon as possible, to get their immediate feedback so we could fail fast and change/add/remove elements quickly. Everyone holds brilliant ideas for how we can visualize it. My focus here is to make sure to challenge the importance of new functionalities or design changes or raise the flag if it would compromise the user experience.

As soon as I am confident that we have all the main functionalities in place, I turn the wireframes into mockups – and lastly a prototype to click through. We, as a team, aims to release the first MVP as soon as we believe that the tool can be beneficial and valuable in their everyday worklife. Therefore it has been important for me to keep prioritizing and finding compromises together with the developers, so we do not end up focusing on small tweaks that is technically challenging, instead of a highly valuable function that is easy and quick to develop.

As soon as the mockups was developed we began interviewing the users again to get their immediate reaction to the tool. I was interested in their first impression and how they wanted to go about the tool to perform their tasks. I gave a brief summary of the goal of the tool, but left out everything about how the functionalities worked. I would share my screen with the mockups and the users were able to tell me what they would do and what they would expect to happen. This was an easy way for us to see if we were on the right path in terms of functionality and design. I continued to iterate on the mockups again and again, while the developers worked on the elements that we were confident about.

Examples of wireframes from Project #2 (1st and 2nd version) of the overview

TEST, TEST, TEST

As soon as the development catches up with the mockups, we shift the attention towards the MVP instead. This way we could provide the direct link to the users and let them share their screen and see how they would click around in the actual version.

I developed a test sheet with specific tasks we wanted the user to perform. This way I could prepare what elements we needed feedback on, which could be in terms of usability issues or finding errors. I would document whether or not the user completed the tasks and write down notes for me to transform into actionable user stories or bugs for the developers.