Research-driven medical portal redesign

For the research project, as Senior UX Researcher, I owned and conducted all research activities with guidance from an advisor and contributions from a content strategist.

For the design project, as Senior Product Designer, I wrote functional requirements, created mid & high fidelity screens, and assisted in building a consolidated style guide.

 
 
 

The medical affairs team at Merck had a problem. They had created a portal with a wealth of research and prescribing data, but it wasn’t gaining much traction because it wasn’t meeting the real needs of healthcare professionals (HCPs). With user research, content strategy, and a concentrated design system effort, our team turned a dense repository into a user-focused healthcare portal.

 
 

Research & evaluation

In the first project, I was tasked with evaluating the Merck medical portal. I conducted a heuristic evaluation, created a research strategy and interview guides, and facilitated user interviews.

  • Heuristic evaluation

  • Research strategy

  • 3 task-focused interview discussion guides (by persona)

  • Conducted 5 interviews with healthcare professionals

  • Readout of overall findings & recommendations

 
 
 
 

The research was so well received that we won additional budget from the client in order to execute the changes I proposed.

We assembled a larger team, adding a visual designer, design lead, & technical lead to bring the recommendations to life.

 
 

For our approach to visual changes, we primarily focused on creating repeatable, scalable styles, allowing the Merck team to add new content to the portal without needing dedicated designers.


We created and documented a new style guide to serve as a source of truth for the updated designs and interactions, and for any new pages or content going forward.

 
 
 

Our usability updates centered on making the portal more predictable, readable, navigable, and easier to browse.

  • To dense, data rich pages, we added ways for users to refine their search results (sorting, filtering, and searching). With such a complicated content taxonomy, this took heavy analysis and repeated iteration.

  • We made significant content & taxonomy updates to make materials easier to find

  • We enhanced styling, typography, and spacing for better readability

  • For improved affordance and consistency, we consolidated styles across the site

  • Finally, with the help of our tech lead, we wrote development user stories for all of the design updates, and vetted them thoroughly with Merck’s dev team.

 

💫 Notable quotables ✨

"We are so excited about the changes. You did so much work with so little effort from us."

"This is even more than what I was hoping for. Everything is so well organized and articulated......And now we are wondering, how soon can we do more work with you?"

"The knowledge, expertise, and perspective of the team was so valuable, and that’s what we really needed."