Roche Diagnostics Website Redesign

Overview

Roche is a multinational medical company that has two main arms, pharmaceuticals and diagnostics. They are the third largest health care company by revenue and their focus is on doing what their patients need next.

Role

Project Manager

Design Lead

Ux Reseacher

UX Designer

Timeline

3 weeks

May 2021

The Brief

Our objective is to create a compelling and engaging information architecture that enables us to scale our engagement and communication with our customers. Our website needs to communicate our solutions coherently and effectively with a focus on benefits and outcomes for customers, as well as our horizontal and intrinsic value, our position as a thought leader, and our impact for customers and patients. The intrinsic value includes but is not limited to sustainability, corporate and social responsibility, service standards, NPS, diversity and inclusion, our culture, innovation, media relations and awareness.

Primary Objective

How do we ensure we rebuild and restructure our website in a way that attracts current and prospective customers to visit, and return to it for valuable content and engagement?

Secondary Objective

Pressure test the current identified personas to ensure there is actually a differentiation of behavior and purpose
Use this knowledge to consider best ways to nurture customer behavior towards the future strategy of a self service portal (please note this would be value-add, not primary purpose)

Understanding the Problem

From the brief of this project we were brought through the constraints around the project. Due to the nature of medical companies and their relationship to the public they can not advertise directly to consumers, and their professional relationships with labs and hospitals are important to them and so this requires digression on our part. This makes initial discovery difficult but, Roche was able to provide us with several contacts for this information. Before we could contact these people we first needed a greater understanding of the existing website.

Competitor Analysis and Heuristics

We started with a competitor analysis and heuristics testing of the primary competitor websites. Our goal here was to understand how the competitors attract, retain customers, market products and how they arrange their own IA.

We also went through the existing Roche site to understand how they have arranged their IA. In addition to this I also categorized their existing product range into their product families and product categories.

Interview insights

We received 8 Roche employees that sit in important customer facing roles to interview, these individual knew all there was to know about their client base and proved to be an invaluable resource. But due to their high workload and our tight dead line only 6 of these had the time talk to us. For this is was also important for us to understand who the customers are. As Roche doesn't sell directly to consumers, the customers are medical labs, hospitals and government project.

Pillars of Roche

In every interview we had two aspects of Roche where made clear; trust and customer service. Each person we interviewed had stories of how they and the Roche team goes above and beyond. This is also reflected in the Roche Diagnostics sales data.

Customer Behavior

There is a wide range of customer behavior that Roche experience. However some of the trend we saw through our interviews were the majority of customers contact Roche over the phone, or by email. This means they bypass the website entirely, Additional information sent to customers is done over email with enclosed PDFs and not website links. This is due to the Roche employees also finding the website hard to navigate. Some customers are very self sufficient and will only contact Roche after first attempting to solve their problem themselves, where as others need their hands held and will call at the drop of a hat.

Growth Potential

One of the reasons that people are visiting the website is for new job opportunities, this website redesign come on the heels of company restructure, that will has resulted in a need to fill many teams and to fill them with people with complimentary skills for their team and for the future of Roche.

Horizontal Content

Roche does so much in the way of community engagement, research and innovation. However none of this is conveyed on their website. An interesting fact we found during the interview process was that Roche was responsible for manufacturing 80% of the worlds Covid-19 tests.

New Business

The majority of new work coming to Roche comes in the form of tenders. The tender process is long, complex and highly competitive.

What Customers want

A recurring theme of these interviews were the inability to find products and their specification.

Develop

My team and I arranged an ideation workshop with the Roche team. For this meeting we devised three how might we questions to focus our ideas;

How might we improve the experience and simplify the tender process for current and future clients?

How might we provide value in Roche Diagnostics Australia site that will help attract current and potential clients?

How might we provide better help and support to satisfy users' needs before and during contact with Roche?

From this workshop we came up with 72 ideas which where then votes on and mapped onto a MVP matrix. Our focus was on the quick wins sections.

Deliver

From our design workshop our team transitioned into an agile workflow to focus on iteration of our designs.

User Testing

Careers should be added to the header
Search for articles should be included
Include patient stories
Too much information on product pages
Specification graphics too playful for medical site
Add links to Roche ELabDoc service
Trouble shooting videos should be product specific

Reflection

This project felt far better planned than others I have done. we adhered to a clear, timeline and achieve our goals as we went. The research part of this project did present a challenge. Due to the sensitive nature of what diagnostics are used for it was hard to find individuals and groups willing to talk about their experiences with the products. Because of this our main source or research comes from employees. The employees know there roles and the interactions with their clients. However this only reflects one side of these transactions. The brief of increasing traffic to the site also becomes hard when only speaking to the internal teams, as we do not get acquitted data on what draws new customers or interest to the site, and focuses on existing resources.