My role

Art Director

The challenge

At a difficult time in life (often right after a Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis) TECFIDERA patients new to therapy needed information on how to manage treatment. We revamped an old email stream in order to put the patient at the center and figure out how to best communicate around managing MS. How could we best provide access to information about the disease, Biogen support systems, and overall what to expect on this new journey with TECFIDERA?

The approach

Put ourselves in the patient’s shoes

With no access to actual patients due to privacy issues, and limited analytics from the original stream, we went through an empathy exercise and worked with the information we had available. Namely, we were well aware of the plethora of materials patients receive upon diagnosis: information on proper dosing, disease management, mitigating side effects, managing symptoms… the list goes on. Couple that with the overwhelming prospect of facing down a life altering disease and we knew we needed to make access to information as easy as possible.

The discovery

The analytic information we had access to showed that the old stream had low open and click-through rates. Having worked with previous patient populations we were also acutely aware that our users potentially suffered from vision and dexterity issues.

The vision

Telling a well organized story

Hierarchy and timing of information was key– we had 13 emails and the narrative had to follow the user along their journey from new, uninformed MS patient to an experienced, informed one. A vision began to form of an easily scan-able layout where the primary call to action was clear and laser focused on the topic of each email.

Visual design

I designed a responsive, modular layout so the abundance of information could be digested as quickly as possible as well as flow from a single column for the mobile experience to a 2 column for desktop layout.

Design choices, a summary:

• To address patients’ accessibly issues I used large, high contrast buttons for all CTAs

• The primary CTA was placed at the top of most mobile emails and in the top right column of their desktop counterparts. This choice was based on data received around how similar emails had performed best in the past

• To help ground patients I wanted to let users know there they were in the stream and added indicators (“1 of 13”, “2 of 13” etc) to help identify where they were on their journey

The impact

Despite our fight to limit overload for a vulnerable user base, there was a wealth of mandated information that we had to include. With this unavoidable obstacle, I chose to focus on what I could control- using design solutions that made the emails as easy as possible to digest. Although data on clickthrough and open rates (the primary “impact” being measured by Biogen) is still being gathered, stakeholders across the organization were excited about the new stream and the project was a success from that perspective. The true impact however, would be found after talking to end users and asking them:

• Describe what was happening in your life around the time these emails arrived in your inbox?

• What was your experience seeing the subject line for the first and then subsequent emails?

• How quickly could you find the information most important to you?

• After reading the subject line, what was your experience looking through the email?

• Look back on the stream of emails, did you feel supported, being sold to, or somewhere in between? Please explain…