AbelsonTaylor

My Roles and Responsibilities

Primary UX Designer, Information Architecture, UX Research

Team

Ten Interns across Strategy and Creative Teams

AbelsonTaylor is a full-service, Chicago agency delivering award-winning design, creative, and marketing strategies for pharmaceutical and consumer health brands.

This project was during 12-week internship where ten individuals, across strategy and creative teams, organically developed a social strategy Pharmaceutical advertising campaign. Within my role, I cultivated information architecture for branded patient site using accessibility guidelines and human-centered design principles.

Problem Space

Product X is yet to be put out into the market, so they have no current social presence. They have a defined HCP (Health Care Provider) campaign and need a Patient Social Campaign. The primary goal is to drive site users to ask their HCP about Product X.

We were tasked with creating a social media strategy with a branded patient website that shapes how Product X can best support education, treatment options, and activation of the target audience to trigger doctor visits and conversions.

Research

During the first few weeks of our project, we prioritized understanding the disease state of C. diff (Clostridioides difficile or C. difficile), how Product X worked and can help make C. diff “gone for good”, and the main pain points / areas of celebration for patients. We wanted to understand not only what patients were feeling, but who they turned to and where their safe spaces were.

We conducted a competitive analysis of the current products used by patients to help their disease state, as well as social listening to hear what patients were saying to one another and their feelings.

Our main findings from this stage of research included:

Embarrassment / stigma around C. diff due to its detrimental side effects
Living in fear of recurrence, missing out on family/friends
Searching for remedies through Facebook groups, Reddit, and other anonymous modalities

Areas of Opportunity

Our team identified recurrent patients as the main target for Product X, since one must have had at least one occurrence of C. diff in order to start taking this treatment, as well as their involved behavior on social media with other patients.

Developing a patient ecosystem through an omnichannel approach defined our process moving forward, as we acknowledged all areas of how a patient may interact with the product: social media channels, experiential programs, and the website.

My goals moving forward were to conduct brainstorming sessions with my team in order to involve multiple disciplines in the process, and finalize the information architecture given the short time frame.

Brainstorming

Through multiple sessions and rounds of affinity diagramming, we identified the main components of the website should include:

Patient stories
Efficacy and clinical data
About Product X, about C. diff
Pen Pals program: initiates conversation and generate empathy around various C. diff experiences: patient-to-patient, care partner-to-care partner, patient-to-care partner
Support and resources
Sign up for support (Pen Pals, newsletter, patient journals)

At this stage, we had come up with the idea to create a pen pals program as a living part of the website. Through our social listening, we identified the major feelings of isolation from this disease state, and uprooting patients on the Product X site was a great opportunity to both increase engagement and reduce stigma.

Information Architecture

After synthesizing the information received from the brainstorming session, along with market research and messaging from social and engagement strategists, I constructed the information architecture. My first action item involved creating a content inventory of all the necessary information to be added. Then, I consulted social strategists and messaging experts to ensure the site flowed with the omnichannel patient ecosystem.

My main goal was to not only prioritize the disease state for both patients and their caregivers, but create an omnichannel approach where patient newsletters, the Pen Pals program, and other forms of connecting with those going through a similar situation could feel heard and seen.

During this, I collaborated with data analysts to ensure we could track engagement metrics, which is how we decided on “Sign Up” being the main call-to-action on the website.

View the Information Architecture

Outcome, Results, and Reflections

Throughout the twelve weeks I worked on this project, I learned the sobering statistics and listened to the stories of hundreds of C. diff patients, from one incidence to many reoccurrences. Empathizing with the lives of patients and truly understanding their stories and lives helped us navigate how to approach such a sensitive yet common disease state. Collaborating heavily with cross-disciplinary and intuitive colleagues greatly helped me craft the skeleton and structure of the website, and understand how to involve an omnichannel approach to a patient-branded website. This was my first experience at an agency, and although I had experience with working in healthcare, this brought a new perspective into how life-changing and imperative holistic experiences are — prior to and after entering a digital experience.

If given more time, I would have certainly wanted formalize user testing using tree testing with landing pages. This would have assisted in validating how patients both experience the website, and what they may want to seek out primarily.

Overall, this experience exemplified my abilities to adapt to an organization’s structure and needs, while incorporating collaborative feedback across multiple disciplines and areas of work. I am honored to have work with such an amazing group of interns.