AstraZeneca's Tool Problem

(AstraZeneca K.K.)

Role: Contract UX designer tasked with researching, conceptualizing, and prototyping an improved medical representative tool.

During a 3-month contract at AstraZeneca, I contributed to a design project focusing on optimizing tools for medical representatives interacting with oncology healthcare providers. Working alongside another designer and a customer experience manager, we researched and proposed solutions to enhance the effectiveness of these tools.

The medical representatives already had 16 tools, we didn't want to design a 17th.

Process

Cards with descriptions of various design thinking activities are arranged on the floor in the order that they will be carried out during a workshop. Each activity has hand written text indicating what the goal of each activity is.

The other UX designer and I dove into the project on the kickoff workshop day, lacking the context of prior research. This limited our influence on the timeline and project requirements. Due to a previous attempt at improving medical representative tools that suffered from a lack of research, management insisted on 50 user interviews for robust insights. After negotiations, we settled on 20 interviews led by my manager and two ex-medical representatives. Unfortunately, our proposal for a concurrent survey to gather quantitative data was rejected by upper management.

Medical Representative Tasks

What we found was that medical representatives have four distinct times of day:

  1. Morning office time - time for checking their travel schedule, replying to emails, and confirming that day's meetings
  2. Parking lot time - time for reviewing what was talked about at previous meetings and making sure all powerpoint slides are in order
  3. Meeting with healthcare providers - presenting new and existing drug options and working with doctors to meet the current needs of their cancer patients
  4. Evening office time - time spent entering data about the days meetings. Some is for personal use to improve their relationship with healthcare providers, other is largely for internal, strategic AstraZeneca use

Primary Persona: High-Tech Hiroyuki

A smartly dressed medical representative is shown with information about his habits as a Medical Representative who readily adopts new technology to do his job.

Secondary Persona: Reliable Tool Reiko

A smartly dressed medical representative is shown with information about his habits as a Medical Representative who readily adopts new technology to do his job.

First Design Thinking Workshop

A workshop was scheduled in the Osaka office to inform stakeholders about the research we had gathered and use that for going through a series of design thinking exercises that would determine a direction.

Image of the Tower of the Sun, a symbol of Osaka

Off to Osaka!

Handwritten concepts written by participants at our first workshop are shown on a desk with stickers indicating their ranking after sticker voting.

5 Concepts to Rule Them All, Or Just Frankenstein Together

A Nautical Themed Retro to Keep Things Fun

A fun looking retrospective board that includes areas titled wind, sun, anchor, and reef. It has sticky notes in each section indicating what went well and what could be improved upon from the previous workshop

Now It's Time To Start Storyboarding, Right?

As hand drawn storyboard showing conceptually how the new tool could solve problems at each step in a medical representative's day. Each frame has a box above that gives context about the tools solutions.

So What Did We Make?

An ipad dashboard that lives in the Veeva software. The page shows information about a specific healthcare provider at the top, then six widgets below that give important information about that healthcare provider. The widgets are configurable for a medical representatives needs.

Healthcare Provider Dashboard

Expanded Widget

Data Input Page

Conclusion

Our final design was well received. As our contract was coming to a close, I made sure my design was accessible to the next contract designers who would be using it for usability testing and collaborating with developers to deliver it in the next 6 months.

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