The start of something big
The DET program at Merck seeks to take brands with no online presence and transform them with a fully integrated, omni-channel engagement model.
A new dawn… a new day…
The Digital Engagement Team (DET) is a huge change for Merck who decided to take the typical slow, static, pharma process and treat it much more like a start-up. Teams of six undergo month long training in Agile and Design Thinking methodologies and are told to think of their work as a “labs” environment- no idea is off the table. Seriously… not even the one that involved the phrase “pumpkin full of medicine” and “trebuchet.”
I was placed on three teams, Chronic Cough, Heart Failure and a new, pilot program, that involves using machine learning to develop apps and programs for sales reps. As UX/CX Lead I was responsible for identifying the desired interactions between the brand and our customers. Additionally, since the DET encourages all teammates to participate in all activities, I had the opportunity to work on campaign strategy, analytics and OGSTMs.
Some Day to Day Activities.
Plan and execute a research plan and conduct user research (qual & quant)
Plan & facilitate design thinking exercises
All UX & IXD deliverables (prototypes, pattern library, personas, journey maps etc)
Style guides and creative direction
We had some suggested segmentation and user research that was done over a year ago to start with, but, we weren’t convinced that it accurately portrayed our audience. We ran an A/B test of some simple assets and surveys to begin testing our hypothesis. In the meantime we conducted one on one research with 6 cardiologists and 2 Primary Care Physicians to get a better understand of their treatment habits.
Once we felt we had enough data to work with, I planned some design thinking exercises with the extended team. The product owner and I developed a pre-read to inform the workshop and I began with an exercise to better understand our customer’s empathy and personality traits.
Our second persona workshop focused around how the perspective customer spends their day and how they interact with technology. To accomplish this I performed a “Jobs to be done” and “Five Whys” session.
We ended up with 3 segments, an example of one is here. The first page is all about our doctor’s drivers, influences and needs…
… The second page is all about their digital needs, preferred types of content and day in the life info.
And your point is....
By following our instincts and challenging the initial, suggested segmentation, we saved time, money and rework by avoiding serving the wrong content to the intended audience. The research plan I helped my team develop used a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods to arrive at personas that are accurate and actionable and will help drive/inform out tactics for the coming year. Our personas are … People…
Tools of the trade (and some bonus stuff)…
The following is a list of tools we use to get the job done.
Two of my teams use Jira to manage our sprints though one is experimenting using Teams.
We use Mural for collaboration and design thinking exercises.
We use Adobe XD, Photoshop, Sketch and Figma for design work and Adobe Connect for user interviews.
We just switched from HotJar to Content Square for monitoring user sessions and, of course, Google Analytics for metrics.
There are a lot of meetings and presentations at Merck and a lot of time is spent in Power Point. Early on, it came to my attention that some of the members of my team had not working with a UX professional before so here is my deck explaining my role to the team.