A Pharmaceutical Company Advances User Experience to Improve Adoption of Internal Resources

The client, one of the world’s largest R&D-based pharmaceutical companies, realized a need to improve the employee experience associated with their core intranet information environment. The client had invested significant resources in their intranet solution, but were not getting the employee adoption rates they expected. Internal feedback suggested employees were having trouble accessing information using the internal environment, and that particular legacy applications within the intranet were cumbersome to use. These difficulties were causing employees to find other sources for their information or to simply do without. The client enlisted West Pole’s expertise in usability and human-computer interaction to evaluate the internal inconsistencies, create guidelines for the user interface, and to drive projects that would make high-value improvements to existing applications within the internal information environment.

Creating Guidelines for Consistency

West Pole executed usability evaluations and surfaced the primary sources of confusion. West Pole then developed standardized display rules for common content items and UI design guidelines based on established UI interaction patterns. Working with the client team, West Pole created and communicated the user experience vision of reducing inconsistencies and unifying the appearance and behavior of a new generation of functionality within the client’s intranet. Guided by the user experience vision, West Pole collaborated with the client’s business and technical teams, providing project management, requirements analysis and user interface design expertise in re-architecting the appearance and navigation of the intranet, as well as the designing and implementation of numerous improvements to internal functionality.

Implementing a Vision of User-Friendly Information Delivery

As a result of this effort, managers know what standards to enforce, developers know what to develop, and employees get improved workflow and tangibly improved consistency in their work environment. Furthermore, multiple related projects used the UI guidelines to shape the user experience of their applications. The client’s information environment now enables users to efficiently and effectively access the information and resources they need to make value-adding contributions to the organization.

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