The Brief

Lilly were about to launch a mobile patient support website aimed at psoriasis patients.  The criteria for screening were that they had been diagnosed with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis for more than 5 years.

They had used another agency to build the prototype using Marvel but we were concerned that it didn’t give some of the functionality in terms of the cues and interactions that we required so we rebuilt it by importing the creative into Axure to create a more functional prototype.

The prototype was to be tested in 2 markets: Germany and Spain.  My role was to go out to Berlin and Madrid for 2 days each to act as observer.  There were 16 participants in each market with the sessions being moderated by a native speaker while I was in the observation room with a simultaneous translator.  As observer, I was also responsible for ensuring that we probed in areas where I felt we needed more information from the participant.  I also had to be aware of our responsibilities in terms of adverse event reporting.  This is an important area when dealing with participants in a pharmaceutical setting.  If a patient mentions anything that constitutes an adverse event we have to report it within one business day.  This could be anything from someone saying that they had a rash after taking the medication through to something like inappropriate supply.

Each session was split into 3 sections: Warmup, card sort and then the main session.

Warmup

This was geared towards getting background information about the participant, to put them at ease, and to make them aware of some compliance issues.

Card Sort

Looking at the list of topics within the asset, we asked participants to choose those that they felt would be most useful to them, and in the order that they thought they should appear.

Main Session

This covered three things:

• What they expected to see in each section
• Whether the content met their expectations
• How easy it was to find what they were looking for

Conclusion

Once completed, I used my notes, the transcripts and the audio recordings to create an 80 page report with all of our findings along with my recommendations for improvements.

The biggest surprise for the client was the content.  Almost without exception, participants said that the content was of a very high quality but not suitable for them at their stage.  They all said that it would have been useful at the start, or that it would be useful for someone newly diagnosed.

Although not promotional, this site was aimed at patients at a certain stage because the treatment in question is used after other treatments have been tried and are no longer effective.

The result of this exercise was that the client had to rethink the content to really start to put the target audience at the heart of the strategy.

Shown here is a selection of images exported from the presentation deck.