Navigating the discovery phase | Designing DRL’s healthcare engagement platform

Dr Reddy’s Laboratories (DRL) was founded in 1984 with a clear mission to make essential medicines affordable and accessible for everyone. This focus on affordability and reach has allowed DRL to serve over 5 million patients, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.

Keeping doctors on the front lines up-to-date on the latest treatments and research can be challenging. DRL understood the critical need for continuous and reliable information to deliver the best possible care.

DRL partnered with us to bridge the knowledge gap worldwide for healthcare professionals (HCPs). Their vision was for a one-of-a-kind platform designed to connect HCPs with reliable information in an engaging and user-friendly way. This platform aimed to revolutionize learning and engagement among healthcare practitioners.

We’ll take a behind-the-scenes look at the design process, focusing on how they made the platform user-friendly for busy healthcare professionals. We’ll talk about how they achieved features like scalability, easy navigation, and personalized content — all to enable HCPs with the information they need.

Understanding Dr Reddy’s vision

At the start of the project, the team immersed themselves in understanding Dr Reddy’s Laboratories’ vision for the Healthcare Engagement Platform.

This involved extensive research into the company’s background, objectives, and the specific challenges they aimed to address. Key stakeholders were interviewed to gain insights into the company’s goals, target audience, and desired outcomes for the platform.

This initial phase laid the groundwork for aligning design strategies with Dr Reddy’s global vision of delivering credible and personalized content to healthcare practitioners.

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Initial client calls & the workshop

Initial calls with the client provided valuable insights into the challenges faced by Dr Reddy, such as scattered information, repetitive content, and disjointed systems.

Stakeholders shared their perspectives on the ideal user experience, highlighting the need for a seamless content search process and personalized content delivery. These collaborative efforts ensured that the design approach was not only user-centric but also aligned with the business objectives of Dr. Reddy’s.

Workshops played an important role in fostering collaboration and aligning project objectives with user needs. Design leads, senior UI/UX designers, and key stakeholders participated in these workshops to comprehensively understand user motivations, pain points, and expectations.

Through value proposition mapping exercises, the team identified the core value that the platform needed to deliver to its users.

Insights from Interviews

In-depth interviews with stakeholders, healthcare professionals, and end users were conducted to uncover the underlying problems and pain points.

Users expressed concerns about the perception of brand-focused content, the lack of access to credible information, and the need for a simplified content search process. These insights were invaluable in shaping the design strategy, focusing on addressing the core problems identified during the discovery phase.

Empathy and affinity mapping

Empathy mapping exercises allowed the team to gain a deep understanding of users’ emotions, motivations, and pain points. This empathetic approach guided design decisions, ensuring that the platform resonated with users on a human level and addressed their specific needs.

Affinity mapping was instrumental in organizing and prioritizing ideas, features, and design elements. It provided a structured framework for aligning design decisions with user expectations, business goals, and technical feasibility.

Crafting solutions

Armed with insights from workshops, client calls, interviews and empathizing with the user’s needs the design team crafted solutions tailored to address the identified problems. Personalized content delivery emerged as a key solution, allowing users to access content based on their preferences and interests.

Detailed author profiling enhanced the credibility of the content, providing users with information about the authors’ backgrounds and expertise.

A wide variety of content formats with a seamless switch experience were introduced to cater to diverse user preferences. The mobile-first approach ensured that the platform was accessible and user-friendly across devices, particularly important for busy healthcare professionals who often access content on the go.

Validation and iteration — fine-tuning the prototype

The iterative design process involved continuous validation through prototyping, user testing, and stakeholder feedback. Collaborative sessions with developers and stakeholders ensured that designs remained technically feasible while meeting user needs effectively. Each iteration brought the design closer to achieving Dr Reddy’s objectives of a user-centric and impactful platform.

Final thoughts

During the discovery phase, we conducted a thorough research process that enabled us to gather valuable insights. These insights have proven to be immensely significant, particularly for healthcare professionals. They have helped us create a platform that will revolutionize how healthcare professionals experience and use it in the future.

This achievement was possible due to the selection of the right research methodologies, collaborative efforts, and data-driven decision-making, combined with human judgment. The success of our research process has allowed us to create a platform that is tailored to the needs of healthcare professionals and will benefit them greatly.

You can download our discovery playbook with actionable research templates!

Dive deeper into our successful collaboration with DRL. Read the complete case study — Dr Reddy’s Laboratories — Building the Future of Healthcare Engagement with Lean UX and Drupal‍

Originally published at https://www.qed42.com.