Revolutionizing Promotional Review in Life Sciences
I began the process with a week-long Design Sprint where we interviewed users about their current process. We learned a lot about referencing medical product claims. The process of referencing product claims takes hours and sometimes days to complete. During the review process there are other challenges such as conflicting feedback and properly documenting approvals. These frustrating manual processes cause low productivity with an average review time of 28 days. The current technology solutions in the marketplace suffer from poor usability, and as a result, low adoption.
The main personas for the platform are medical writers who often work at an ad agency, the brand manager working at the client, and then a review team which often includes external experts. The high-level journey is to draft a copydeck with citations to other documents, a review and collaboration stage, and finally, approval.
The solution we arrived at is a modern, browser-based document viewer with the ability to leave comments, submit approvals, and reference product claims. The most unique solution was how people referenced a product claim. We found that it was sort of like a citation where it needed to link to a specific section in another document. The fastest and best way was to highlight the text in the primary document, choose which document you want to cite, and then highlight the text in the reference document.
We knew that the referencing of product claims was the most high risk since there are not a lot of similar experiences so we focused on that aspect first. I created a clickable prototype and a script. Sessions were recorded so we could see mouse movements and capture audio feedback of what worked and what didn’t. It took three iterations until we were confident in the experience.
The most complex part of the solution was the engineering required to highlight text. We ended up having to change our document viewer to a vendor that had common functionality like highlighting text built-in.
We were able to compare the time that users performed the same task in the legacy system compared to Papercurve, and the same scope of work was done in one-fifth the amount of time.
Making the feature clear and intuitive was a challenge that required numerous iterations to improve adoption.
Our testers became early evangelists and promoted Papercurve within their organizations, ultimately becoming customers.
