They knew something was off, and wanted a second opinion

IN THIS CASE, THE PHARMACEUTICAL AND BIOTECHNOLOGY COMPANY built a healthcare education platform that raised basic questions to us right away: What was it for? Who did it serve? And why register for an experience that looks nearly identical to the unregistered experience?

That confusion showed up in how the experience was set up:

• no clear purpose
• no obvious audience
• no real next step
• no useful hierarchy
• content organized by format instead of topic

The platform can’t explain itself.

This kind of issue is hard for a client to articulate. It forces them to confront the possibility that the experience never really made a clear promise in the first place. It also enables the client to ask if the internal team who took on the project really understood what the project was trying to solve?

The client thought a redesign would solve the problem…

The client didn’t realize that their plan and the resulting platform failed to communicate its purpose/intent/value to its intended audience.

The core idea here is simple: when people can’t tell what a platform is for, the first failure is strategic. Audience clarity breaks before design does. If the audience can’t grasp the purpose, the value, or the path through the experience, a cleaner interface might help later, but it won’t do much to change the outcome.

Most teams treat this as a design issue. That’s why they end up solving the wrong thing.

Design gives people something to react to. It feels like progress.

The problem is, once the conversation moves there, the real issue (strategic intent) gets buried deeper.

From there, you’re no longer fixing what’s actually going on. You’re making it look better and calling it progress.

In healthcare, confusion is expensive

You can see this from two separate perspectives:

1. The intended audience perspective  
2. The hard costs to define, deliver, and drive your intended audience

From the audience’s perspective, trust is already fragile in healthcare. Here, the audience included physicians, pharmacists, and nurses looking for credible resources they could use in real patient conversations about vaccines.

In that context, unclear structure does more than create friction. It chips away at trust and usefulness. If the experience feels vague, generic, or even slightly promotional, the audience has another reason to disengage.

From a hard cost perspective, the old adage applies: measure twice, cut once. First, define what the experience is meant to solve. Second, build and design the plan to deliver it. Third, plan how to drive the audience to it. And please don’t forget the unsung fourth part: measurement, so you can optimize.

Both perspectives come with costs: trust, time, and money.

What better looked like

At that point, it was clear this wasn’t a cosmetic problem. The structure needed to be fixed.

We started by understanding the business, the pain points, and the ambitions, and only then worked through how it actually needed to function. In this project for a global pharma/biotech company, that meant building a content strategy and information architecture around how healthcare professionals think and what they need, before worrying about what shows up on screen.

In practice, that meant:

• organizing around topics instead of forcing people to choose between “PDF”, “video”, or “webinar”
• reducing cognitive load
• making it easier to find what you need without clicking through multiple formats just to get the same content
• creating a real visitor journey, with clear hierarchy and cues
• showing value before asking people to register or push through friction
• turning hard-to-use formats into something more usable

That’s what it looks like when usefulness is built in from the start.

Design matters. But it works best when it has something coherent to express.

The better sequence for a Healthcare Provider (HCP) experience

If an HCP portal or provider hub is underperforming, the order you tackle things in matters.

1. Diagnose the comprehension problem.
   Figure out whether people are unclear on the purpose, the value, who it’s for, or what to do next.
2. Define the communication job.
   ‍Get clear on what promise the experience is making and what role the content needs to play.
3. Build the content logic and information architecture.
   ‍Organize the experience around how the audience thinks and what they’re actually trying to find.
4. Design the interface to make that logic visible.
   ‍Design should reinforce the strategy, not be left to figure it out as it goes.

That sequence is how the work actually tends to unfold: understand the problem, define the job, build the structure, then design around it. The labels aren’t the point. The point is to identify the real problem before anyone gets busy executing the wrong answer.

If you want a quick way to pressure-test that thinking, a few questions tend to surface it quickly.

A quick test before another redesign cycle

Before funding another redesign, ask a few blunt questions:

• Can a first-time visitor tell what this platform is for within a few seconds?
• Is it immediately clear who it’s for?
• Is there any visible value before hitting a gate or being asked to register?
• Does the navigation help people move through topics, or mostly reflect the internal filing system?
• Do the assets feel connected and usable, or just uploaded?
• Is there a reason to come back after the first visit?

If those answers are weak, the problem isn’t the interface.

That doesn’t make interface work irrelevant. It just means it comes later.

Why this matters beyond one project

Underperforming experiences often get treated as styling problems because styling is easier to debate than structure. You can spend hours discussing layouts and still avoid the core question: Does anyone understand the offer?

When the answer is no, redesign becomes a way to move forward without resolving the problem.

That’s usually where time starts to get burned:

• stakeholder time: because the conversation stays on aesthetics instead of decisions
• design time: because designers get asked to make it make sense
• audience patience: because users are left doing work the platform should have handled
• trust: especially in categories where credibility is part of the value

None of that shows up as a design issue, but it all traces back to the same place.

Once the team knows who the experience is for, what it solves, what content supports that promise, and how people should move through it, design can finally do its job. Until then, it’s being asked to cover for unresolved thinking.

If you’re in that spot, pause before starting another one. A quick diagnostic can change what happens from there.

With that in mind:

The takeaway

Before starting another redesign, run a harder diagnostic. Look at the purpose, the audience fit, the information hierarchy, the content logic, and the value visible before any friction shows up.

If the platform still can’t explain itself quickly, a better-looking screen won’t fix it.

Before anything gets redesigned, understand what’s actually going on. Start with a better diagnosis.