The Story

This is, without any doubt, one of the most exciting projects I’ve worked on.  Think of all the spam you’ve had since spam was a thing.  If I asked you to name a couple of products that had driven you mad in terms of the spam you’ve received I’ll bet Viagra would be pretty close to the top. This project is the reason this site is password protected.  It is in the public domain that this is happening so I can share this story but I’d rather it was gated than completely open until it’s actually live.  From next year, Pfizer will be selling Viagra over the counter at the pharmacy and, more importantly, online via an e-commerce website direct to consumers.  This will be globally, including in the UK.

I worked as part of a team to put this project together where we did personas and user journeys, information architecture, content strategy and wireframes.  I contributed to all of this – less so on the research but almost exclusively on the wireframes and functional spec.  The project covers 2 sites: an education site for health care professionals and the public facing site for consumers.

We also worked with Kantar to do the user testing and I played a part in building the discussion guide for this.  It was surprising that we managed to recruit men to take part in this.  More controversial was the fact that we had several cases of inappropriate supply: “A mate down the pub gave me a couple of pills” being the most common issue.

The challenge with this, and all pharmaceutical  content has to be approved by the MHRA (Medical and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency).  Sometimes, what they ask for contradicts what we believe is right for the user so we have a delicate dance to do with them to negotiate compromises.

As challenging has been the fact that I spent several weeks on this where the content on my screen was potentially embarrassing!

We have now completed all of our work right up to the creative and have handed all the assets over to Pfizer who will be responsible for the build of the site.  The plan at the moment is that this will launch in 2 or 3 European markets in early 2018 and then extend from there.