The Big Question
Pharmaceutical distributer PBA Health was in need of an overhaul of a flagship customer program. Sales reports and site analytics provided important data to their executive team.
With the answer to “what,” company leadership created a hypothesis to “why,” but were those assumptions correct?
Instead of taking that hypothesis as a certainty and jumping right into a redesign, I pitched executive leadership on a robust discovery effort first.
Ultimately, what we learned from customers told a significantly different story than the data-only hypothesis. These insights culminated in a shift to product strategy, new branding, and an evolutionarily improved UI.
Context
Pitching the Importance of Discovery
Early executive one-on-ones, a robust and exciting kickoff session, and appropriate project collateral created a sense of buy-in from the leadership team about the importance and ROI of conducting a discovery and planning phase before jumping right into any UX/UI refresh. The results would be worth it.
Customer Interviews & Ethnography
The foundation of the discovery effort included remote customer interviews along with a series of one hour ethnographic sessions with PBA Health’s customer pharmacies.
Research Activities
- In-Depth Remote Interviews with PBA Health Customers
- Ethnographic Sessions with Pharmacists
- PBA Health Sales / Business Development Team and Marketing Team Interviews
- Google Analytics Audit
- UX Heuristic Review
- Thematic Analysis of Research Data
Discovery Findings & a Product Pivot
We found the story the customers told us – their reasoning for purchasing decisions and how & why they interacted with various pharmaceutical sites – was a much different one than the hypothesis the executive team had. These direct insights were them analyzed for commonalities and categorized.
