Ethicon

An evolution of customer engagement

Responsive Web / Pharma / B2B / eCommerce

Details

Delivering essential value and life-changing impact at the heart of healthcare

Ethicon Inc. is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, was in the middle of a shift their customer engagement strategy, moving from traditional product focus to procedural selling.

We provided direction and execution concepts that realigned the Ethicon.com site objective to a customer journey that meets both procedure (exploratory) and product (reference) customer needs and builds upon current analytics. We focused on delivering a holistic user experience strategy and technical implementation road map that positioned Ethicon.com as a central hub for product information and thought-leadership that is impactful and keeps customers connected & engaged with the latest surgical solutions.

Goals

Shift customer engagement from product focus to procedural selling.
Provide information architecture strategy for Ethicon.com (current) and ‘Ethicon Product Resource Center’ or EPRC (future).
Deepen online engagement with core audiences.
Strengthen Ethicon’s online presence to better reflect a company leading innovation.
Enrich and strategically focus field conversations with customers.
Position Ethicon as a leader in innovation.

Framework

For this project I developed a framework that is a blend of cognitive science, human-computer interaction, information retrieval, and library science that I have addapted to meet my own needs. The framework is combination of two information retrieval models, the Classic and the Berry Picking models, that I use to help architect experiences that address a users needs at each step of their journey. I call it the Wayfinding framework

The Wayfinding framework consists of two information retrieval models the classic model, and the Berry picking model.The combination of which describe the relationship between a person’s mental model or a representational structure that affects how they retrieve and store information.

The Classic model
The classical model can be explained as follows:

User wants information from a collection of objects: information need
User formulates need as a query
System finds objects that satisfy query
System presents objects to user in useful form
User determines which objects from among those presented are relevant

https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/berrypicking.html

The Berry Picking model
In this model, the user may identify useful information and references… the query is satisfied not by a single final retrieved set, but by a series of selections of individual references and bits of information at each stage of the ever-modifying search a bit-at-a-time.

https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/berrypicking.html

The pattern for the berry picking models is more of a random walk where the path consist of a succession of random and unpredictable steps. The line represents the continuity of a single user being moving through many actions, either in a single session or across multiple sessions, toward a general goal of a satisfactory completion of research related to an information need.

I find this model particularly useful. It not only allows me to focus on the organization of content and its interconnectedness but also the hierarchical structure of a pages anatomy that accommodate this mindset across multiple visits and levels of intent & engagement.

My Adaptation & affordances that can be organized under each:

Classic model - Task oriented - Elements that can expedite task completion for users with familiarity of the sites information structure and nomenclature.
Affordances: CTA, search, elements in the utility nav (i.e: my profile, my orders…), product specs…

Berry picking - Exploratory - Organization of content and its interconnectedness and the hierarchical structure of a pages anatomy that accommodate the exploratory mindset across multiple visits and levels of intent & engagement.
Affordances: Main navigation (establishes a mental model of the sites structure), product overview, content crosslinking, product recommendations (“You might also like…”), landing pages with overview content, clear product features.

It’s good to remember that as humans we hold mental representations of prior life experiences into causality and goals. The ultimate goal of this frame works to take the complexity out of something complex by leveraging the familiar in our work.

Solution

The final design ensured every visitor will have the option to learn Ethicon’s mission, and see case studies of how Ethicon is delivering on their brand mission.

Additionally, in order to allow for efficient and effective navigation across ‘exploration’ and ‘utility’ mindsets of our clinical audiences, we implemented the following:

Provided a single, uniform navigation structure across all pages/templates (Primary, Secondary, Utility).

Used navigation to increase visits to procedure/specialty content.

Restructured faceted (main navigation) & hierarchical (page level) taxonomies and existing content based on element traits, intent and implicit relationships to support task completion.

Expanded and enhanced site search to allow visitors to conduct site-wide search that yields a faceted results page that aligns user needs with organizational goals.

Encourage clinical audiences to view Ethicon’s leadership at a procedural level by aligning specialty-specific content under “Procedures” in Main navigation.

Page level hierarchies serves a reciprocal of main navigation better supporting user needs & intention down funnel.

Sample page

Landing page is a sample of how we organized content based on surgical procedure with supporting affordances for each mental model of the wayfindign framework.

Procedure landing page