TL;DR:
- User experience (UX) design is crucial for creating high-quality digital products that increase engagement, conversion, customer retention, and brand equity while lowering support costs.
- We helped a top five biotech company scale its UX team, streamline design systems, and improve the effectiveness of its digital products through UX design.
- Blankfactor’s UX Design Director, Carlos Monge, played a key role, leading design improvement projects for multiple websites and developing a master design system and process to build design themes.
- These new improvements also helped our partner’s growing design team see significantly faster production times and productivity gains, leaving a long-lasting positive impact on the team.
Rapidly evolving customer expectations and market trends are pushing life sciences companies to innovate the customer experience continually. (PwC) Seamless digital products are increasingly the future of that customer experience. Whether it’s a hospital purchasing drugs from a pharmaceutical marketplace or an app delivering patient results for personalized medicine, the way patients and buyers navigate digital products can build customer loyalty and value — or lead to abandoned carts.
From user research to implementing actionable and intuitive interfaces, the UX process can help companies better understand and serve their customers’ needs. Here’s how Blankfactor helped one top five biotech firm scale their UX team, streamline design systems, and take steps to unlock UX design value for their digital products.
The business impact of UX design
User experience (UX) design is a critical foundation for creating high-quality digital products. But depending on the resources available, design and product teams may be only partially leveraging the systems, tools, and frameworks of UX.
Whether it’s researching user needs with real-world patients, developing accessible visuals that clearly engage the right user action, or creating efficient design systems to ensure internal stakeholders are aligned in the product development process, leveraging the full spectrum of capabilities that fall within user experience design can prove crucial to the success of product design.
For companies rethinking their design resources or looking to expand their in-house capabilities, consider a few of the benefits:
- Increased engagement and conversion: Optimized navigation, clearer information, and frictionless checkout boost sales, converting more app users and website visitors into customers. For high-value biotech products, like large drug orders for doctors’ offices, even small conversion gains can lead to substantial revenue impacts.
- Better customer retention: Good UX design builds customer satisfaction and trust. With smooth product education and buying processes, customers are more likely to return.
- Lower support costs: Frustrated, confused site or app users lead to increased customer service support – and associated costs, which eats into revenue. Easy-to-use digital products and self-service capabilities mean lower costs.
- Positive brand equity: A well-designed, functional app or website increases the perception of the brand’s value, translating into a competitive advantage.
Yet most pharmaceutical and healthcare companies aren’t fully tapping into the benefits and capabilities of UX design. For instance, as few as 27% of the industry’s digital teams incorporate user research into their product development process, according to one report (Graphite Digital).
Our client, a top five biotechnology company, understands the potential. They were looking for ways to expand their UX design resources, streamline design processes, and improve the effectiveness of their digital products through UX. Here’s how we helped.
Developing commercial websites for key pharma products
Our client’s mission: roll out several websites to market a new pharmaceutical product around the world. Simultaneously, they sought a high-quality design, consistent branding, and a structure that made content production simple and flexible for various sites and markets. Plus, they needed to do it fast.
Initially, our software development team stepped in to support the project, helping to quickly deploy the websites, create an optimal structure for local marketing needs, and offer coaching and technical mentorship for the client’s team of new hires who had recently been onboarded.
But our partner also lacked design resources. Our team, including Blankfactor’s UX Design Director, Carlos Monge, jumped in to assist, from delivering mockups to creating UI components to helping the development team launch the vaccine website.
We quickly made a tangible impact — and they quickly elevated Monge to help transform their internal design system.
Bringing Blankfactor’s expertise to design systems across digital products
Optimizing the design library and operationalizing the design efforts was a perfect challenge for Blankfactor’s UX designers.
Observing that our client partner could benefit from a standardized approach to design system organization, naming conventions, and more, Monge produced a master design system and a process to build design themes based on the master system. The goal was to create a unified design language that could be rapidly deployed across all the companies’ current and future products. This new resource empowered designers with the tools needed to quickly scale their designs for new websites and internal productivity tools — all while ensuring that processes were in alignment with other internal stakeholders.
To produce the design system, Monge consulted with internal leaders from product to development teams, developing consensus on crucial aspects of design — from component responsiveness to file structuring.
“Design systems aren’t only for designers. There’s going to be a lot of people involved in the design process,” said Monge, describing the complex collaboration involved in creating design processes for enterprises. When implemented successfully, design systems can lead to collaborative efficiencies, improved brand consistency, and improved onboarding for new designers.
These new improvements also helped our partner’s growing design team see significantly faster production times and productivity gains, leaving a long-lasting positive impact on the team.
User interface improvements that drive revenue
Monge went on to lead a design improvement project for the client’s pharmaceutical e-commerce website — one of its primary revenue generators. Used by hospitals, doctors, and pharmacies to purchase vaccines and other medications, the website is a key asset, and Monge discovered a host of mission-critical opportunities for design improvement.
Though our partner had UX research resources that enabled data-driven design decision-making for every design product, they required additional support with user interface design.
This is where Monge contributed significant value to their UX process, creating a refreshed experience for an improved checkout flow, for instance. By producing more prominent design features during the buying stage of the user journey, such as enhancing button visibility and UX copy, Monge’s user experience improvements enabled site visitors to more effectively place orders, which is anticipated to translate into a positive revenue impact.
“This emphasizes the importance of good design in the creation of digital products… and the importance of having contact with real users, basing our design decisions on data,” said Monge.
A welcome challenge for a seasoned UX expert
Working with leading brands and learning how to adapt and succeed in each of their unique environments is one of the benefits and challenges of Monge’s role with a digital partner like Blankfactor. “We quickly adapted and got up to speed in an environment where there was no clear checklist of to-dos,” he said.
Another rewarding aspect of his work with our biotech partner was the opportunity to mentor other designers, supporting and training new design team members on the latest best practices in the industry.
For the client, that’s an advantage, too. With talented design leaders like Monge, companies can quickly optimize their systems and products — while freeing their teams to onboard new talent or focus resources elsewhere.
Partner with a digital team that brings UX design expertise
In an increasingly competitive landscape, UX design is no longer just a nice-to-have – it’s essential for driving business growth, increasing customer loyalty, and maintaining a competitive edge. Still, building a valuable UX design practice or leading a successful UX-driven project requires more than just hiring designers. It requires a strategic approach that encompasses user research, design systems, and cross-functional collaboration.
By partnering with experienced UX experts on our team, companies can rapidly scale their design capabilities, streamline processes, and unlock the full potential of their digital products. Whether you’re a financial services firm looking to optimize your digital banking experience or a life sciences company seeking to enhance your e-commerce platform, our team can deliver digital and design solutions from end to end.
Learn more about our services and capabilities or sign up for a complimentary 60-minute strategy session today.
