Cortellis Generics Intelligence is the next generation product previously known as Newport. It allows users to have success in the highly competitive generics market, to grow their business, defend their market share, stay ahead of competition and identify new markets, products and partners.
The re-design has been an ongoing process for over 2 years, I've been the UX designer dedicated to this vertical, working with 4 different development teams plus the core team.
The Challenge
Newport is a very old product that's been in the market since the 90's, so naturally like other products in the web, it needed to be re-branded to keep up with the new user needs and competitors in the market. It wasn't an easy task, first we needed to know what users needed, the pain points from the current application and the things that were actually working.
Analysis of the Product
One of the first steps to take was an analysis of Newport and what we thought were going to be key features in the re-branding, there was already some customer feedback on what users were missing in the legacy product so we had a good starting point. There we some other features that we thought could be interesting for our users, but of course, these needed validation.
User Research
We interviewed different profile users so we could get different types of feedback and tackle different pain points. We got important feedback from the first interviews and we knew that it wouldn't stop there, but it was a good starting point.
We discovered initial issues like: they struggled to search by a certain type of search, they didn't understand quite well the hierarchy from the data, they wanted better filtering and graphs to see and analyse better the data.
So this gave us enough to start with some low fidelity designs and proposals.
First Proposals
I started making some low-fidelity prototypes to test with users, we have other products in Clarivate and I worked in other products like Cortellis and Drug Discovery Intelligence, so keeping a brand and a design system while having an identity for Generics Intelligence was an interesting challenge but very important.
So Many Iterations
I can't count how many first proposals were designed for the homepage, the dashboard and the product page, I believe my Sketch file and Adobe XD were running out of memory. And this was only to show Product Managers and Stakeholders before we show the first prototypes to the users.
Fortunately at Clarivate, we use the Agile methodology where we had iterations on designs and development, and the requirements and solutions evolved through this process. We had tons of inside feedback but it was great to come up with a couple of high fidelity proposals in order to conduct some A/B testing.
These were some of the first high fidelity solutions:
Total Transformation
The first solutions presented to the users definitely had a big impact, it definitely had the wow factor for them, the use of graphs was something they really got excited about, in general the User Experience was a total different, new and improved for them:
"Makes it clearer"
"Easy to spot what I’m looking for"
"Right balance"
"We are really excited about this, really like the view. This is the type of analysis I would do, it will save us a lot of time"
So yeah, it was a good start but we also had other feedback on areas to improve.
Challenges and Compromises
Like every project there are challenges that I faced, like I mentioned before, I worked with 4 different development teams, 1 in Barcelona where I'm located and 3 in Russia. I had to have something prepared every sprint for them, my UX team is large but everyone is assigned to one project. So it wasn't easy, at the begging I had to align my schedule with the different teams and talk to Solution Analyst and Product Managers so that I could have my own Jira board to document all UX stories and tasks that I had and work sprints prior to the devs work.
Also, yes, we had many iterations but once we had the product more in shape, and after the product launched we keep asking users for feedback to see if what we have in the product is working for them.
One compromise that we made in a product page is that we added graphs to better understand the data, but users still felt like they were missing data, or rather they wanted to see the data in detail, so we made a switch toggle design to have both the graphs and the table.
What's Next?
The product is launched and it has been well received by our customers. However, there are still areas of improvement. We are also adding more data and new modules for our customers.
Our users can use a special tool in the product to give us feedback but we also send surveys to better improve our product. For the new features that are coming we are making user testing and interviews so that we tackle the needs from the users. Our goal is to improve the customer delight.
This is an ongoing process of improving the user experience in our product and making it unique in the market.
