Sanofi B2B eCommerce

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Sanofi B2B eCommerce

This global phamaceutical company and vaccine manufacturer wanted to redesign and rebuild their 18 year-old B2B eCommerce website. The rebuild includes migrating to a new SAP Hybris platform, updating the brand design and user interface, and improving the end-to-end user experience. The redesign is scheduled to launch in early 2020.

the goal

The company’s digital vision is be their customers’ chosen solutions partner—continuously supporting their goals through easy and seamless transactions, while re-establishing the brand as a digital leader in the marketplace. Even in its outdated state, the site represents more than $2B of annual sales, and is a critical contributor to overall business revenue. The improved site experience will be measured on it’s ability to further grow this revenue.

The Challenge

Research identified that customers are willing to use more than one supplier, and are less likely to have a main supplier. This indicated that the company is not as differentiated from its competitors as it was in the past. 

Healthcare organizations are evolving to a Value-Based Healthcare delivery model, where they are measured and paid based on patient health outcomes (as opposed to the amount to healthcare services they deliver). This shift means that customers are looking for business partners who can help them save time and be more efficient with ordering supplies and managing inventory—which in turn means staff have more time to focus on patient care. They value increased personalization and automation that support the need for these operational efficiencies. 

The current eCommerce experience is highly complex in both scope and scalability. The experience needs to be flexible enough to accommodate the needs of large, multi-tiered healthcare systems and pharmaceutical retailers, as well as smaller, individual private medical practices. Within these segments, there are several levels of customer role and user type.

The site is used, first and foremost, to purchase vaccine products. However, it does have other important uses, such as account management; invoice payment and tracking; order and shipment tracking; credit application; and access to value-add services, resources and tools.

Customers were surveyed about the current experience, and the main pain points included:

• The current site layout and navigation impedes the ability to easily find information

• There are too many clicks to get to desired content

• Site performance is dismal. Load times are not optimal, particularly on mobile devices

• The site layout is outdated and needs to be refreshed

• There is a lack of clarity or guidance to help the customer understand and take advantage of available tools and services

• There is a need for enhancements to handle accounts for large, multi-office locations/health systems

• There are too many time-consuming manual processes

my role

I am responsible for leading a 5-person design team and to collaborate with the client’s development partner, key stakeholders, project management and customer experience strategy. I define the creative vision; manage the experience strategy and design thinking; coordinate delivery of design assets; and prepare for/participate in user testing. I also create, manage and distribute the Design System documentation. This is a resource that is used by the design team, development team and client. It defines the design principles, styles, components, templates and behavioral rules that are being established for the website experience. 

The Design process

We began the project by conducting a collaborative prioritization workshop, bringing together the key parts of the business that would have inputs into the new experience. The intent was to involve these stakeholders at the early stages and give them a chance to express their concerns and offer ideas for improvement and areas of opportunity. 

Following this workshop, I worked with our project manager to define the plan, determine cadence of sprints, set up review cycles and coordinate user testing. I coordinated with our staffing partners to select the design team, and I created a set of design process documents to review with the client. During this planning phase I estimated delivery schedules and level of effort for 2 design tracks running concurrent sprints. 

I spent 6 weeks participating in daily requirements gathering sessions, hearing from the client stakeholders, SMEs and technology teams as they demonstrated current site functionality and discussed future state improvements. The requirements were captured by the developer partner and documented in Functional Requirements drafts. Our strategy/BA lead reviews the requirements drafts, identifies those that were specific to the user experience, and creates user stories for design team reference. 

As the user stories are defined, the design teams work in an iterative flow. Each 2-person team, comprised of an Experience Designer and a Visual Designer, is responsible for a defined set of features and functions of the website experience. I provide oversight and guidance as we develop and refine our recommended design solutions.

The design teams demo in-progress work daily. This can consist of sketches, wireframes, low-fidelity prototypes or visual renderings. Stakeholders participate in each daily review. Feedback is gathered and prioritized, and refined solutions are created. These are reviewed with the developer partner to validate technical feasibility. Once a solution has been approved and validated, the design team prepares final, high-fidelity design assets and documents behavioral specifications. As assets are finalized and delivered, I continually update the Design System documentation to reflect the defined system styles and rules. 

The design concept

The enhanced customer experience is defined by the following principles:  

• Eliminate ambiguity. Enable customers to see, understand and act confidently

• Automate tasks. Simplify design complexities and functional redundancies

• Individualize support. Design a flexible, customized experience that is relevant and evolves to meets each customers needs

• Focus on smart organization to make a system of many appear fewer

• Balance complexity with simplicity to provide customers with everything they need to move quickly through the ordering experience

• Use color sparingly and purposefully for strong visual affect. Allow users to quickly scan and focus on the most important information

We chose a system design approach in order to create a responsive framework that can work at scale and flex to adapt to multiple user types and needs. 

the result

I left my position at the agency before this project went live. However, there were many lessons I learned as we went through the initial phases of our problem solving, and those were planned to be incorporated into ongoing approaches moving forward. 

One of the biggest hurdles we faced was attempting to apply systemic design methodology to a complex, highly customized data model. The benefit of moving to an out-of-the-box eCommerce platform was for stability and standardization—but the site administrators had been so conditioned, over time, to request and receive ad-hoc adjustments to the front-end code, that it was initially difficult for them to trust that our proposed system design framework could provide equal levels of flexibility. These were continuous, ongoing conversations to help site administrators and business stakeholders shift their mindset to this scalable, modular approach. 

The design team’s purpose was to keep the client focused on the customer experience, and to provide meaningful improvements that added value. User testing to learn more about the ways in which the customers expect and want to engage with the site will help refine future solutions and accomplish the client’s goal to reposition themselves as a digital leader within their industry. The client was very pleased with the improvements and was enthusiastic about introducing the redesigned experience to their customers.