We designed a new website to help the advocates for generic and biosimilar medicines and drive engagement with their users and bring their brand to life.
The Generic Pharmaceutical Association (GPhA) has advocated for generic and biosimilar medicines since 2000. Looking to update their brand perception, educate their current and prospective members about the benefits of generics, and compel their members to support advocacy efforts, they rebranded themselves as the Association for Accessible Medicines (AAM). AAM selected Blue Water to redesign/rebuild their site using Drupal to help tell this new brand story. The new site had to be approachable and conversational, instead of cold and scientific.
In this project with Blue Water, I conducted discovery research and onboarding sessions for the rest of the team, as well as drafted a sitemap and wireframes.
We spent 8 weeks conducting discovery and setting the strategic foundation for the website redesign.
Project Discovery, Sitemapping, Wireframes
During our kickoff meeting, we interviewed our stakeholders to determine who their users are, how they advocate for generic medicines, and the new direction they were looking to take their website in. We had previously sent an intake questionnaire to guide the conversations during kickoff.
Our initial discovery sessions with the team yielded the following project goals:
To pitch our proposed sitemap to the AAM team, we prepared a set of slides (below) that primed them to better understand the proposal and how our solution would meet user goals. The second half of our sitemap presentation session was a collaborative critique and page naming workshop to determine names for the new content groupings that would resonate best with their planned brand and industry.
They didn't understand the concept of a sitemap, and how it differed from navigation, so we had to go back and improve our visualization of the work before we could move into the next stages of the project. This led us to creating sketches of the navigation elements we foresaw the site needing so that the client could better understand the reasoning behind the sitemap and could feel reassured that we weren't misaligned on navigation.
Learning opp: document the differences between a sitemap and navigation. Rescope our projects to include navigation structures during sitemapping.
We designed wireframes of the homepage, and four other interior pages with a specific focus on a template-based content hierarchy and create visual representation of site depth to make the site more scalable. Since the AAM team was looking to improve their brand awareness through thought leadership and registration processes for their main event, our wireframes included pages for these, as well as a sample landing page and interior content page.
Our initial wireframes helped the AAM team better visualize the navigation elements and page layouts for the proposed sitemap and they were excited to begin the visual design, so the wireframes were approved quickly with minimal revisions to the layouts and content hierarchies.
From here, we updated the creative brief to document any relevant findings and feedback that would help onboard our graphic design and content strategy teams to continue work on the project. We were available for brief consultation with those teams to share our research findings and ensure that the strategic plan for the site was reflected in those phases of the project as well.
Our discovery research helped us uncover our main goals around how we direct users to the content that will help them achieve their desired outcomes:
Our stakeholder interviews helped us learn about their three major business goals of helping people, improving the pharmaceutical industry, and transforming society as a whole. In building our sitemap, we focused on highlighting their advocacy campaigns (society), events (industry), and patient testimonials (people).
Limited time, limited money; we needed to learn as much as we could about the business and the website quickly. no additional stakeholder contact, no user contact, but we did have a host of passive data (lagging indicators) that tell us that it's time to fix these problems that have been problems for a while.
Coming out of our discovery phase, we drafted a Rapid UX report to communicate our findings and our recommended strategy for how we believe the association should move forward.
We sought answers to our team's open questions and investigated the data we had to build a representative picture of the client's audience that were based on real user feedback and data.
We outlined personas and journey maps for six of their primary user audiences to help communicate the overall strategy for the website back to our stakeholders to begin laying the foundation for the design and content strategy.
To pitch our proposed sitemap to the AAM team, we prepared a set of slides (below) that primed them to better understand the proposal and how our solution would meet user goals. The second half of our sitemap presentation session was a collaborative critique and page naming workshop to determine names for the new content groupings that would resonate best with their planned brand and industry.
They didn't understand the concept of a sitemap, and how it differed from navigation, so we had to go back and improve our visualization of the work before we could move into the next stages of the project. This led us to creating sketches of the navigation elements we foresaw the site needing so that the client could better understand the reasoning behind the sitemap and could feel reassured that we weren't misaligned on navigation.
Learning opp: document the differences between a sitemap and navigation. Rescope our projects to include navigation structures during sitemapping.
We designed wireframes of the homepage, and four other interior pages with a specific focus on a template-based content hierarchy and create visual representation of site depth to make the site more scalable. Since the AAM team was looking to improve their brand awareness through thought leadership and registration processes for their main event, our wireframes included pages for these, as well as a sample landing page and interior content page.
Our initial wireframes helped the AAM team better visualize the navigation elements and page layouts for the proposed sitemap and they were excited to begin the visual design, so the wireframes were approved quickly with minimal revisions to the layouts and content hierarchies.
From here, we updated the creative brief to document any relevant findings and feedback that would help onboard our graphic design and content strategy teams to continue work on the project. We were available for brief consultation with those teams to share our research findings and ensure that the strategic plan for the site was reflected in those phases of the project as well.
We designed and prototyped a Slackbot that streamlines project onboarding, delivering document summaries and task liststhat help our team find the right information at the right time. Our project tied for third in the 2025 Fearless Purple Hackathon despite an unfinished body of work.
We created customized views of coming of ager journeys to Medicare based on their scenarios. Our improvements resulted in improved access to Medicare applications, improved customer satisfaction, and more personalized guidance.
We partnered with the regional health system to redesign their public-facing website to serve as a gateway to the Digital Front Door project, a project to merge all digital touchpoints and improve how they direct patients to the appropriate form of care.
