Sector:
Healthcare, B2B

Challenge: 
Bring the perspectives of real people (key actors & end users) into all stages of the program from design through implementation to change management and implementation.

My Role:
 Lead UX Strategy, User Research, Information Architecture, UI Design
Engagement Time: 
6 months
Overview
Novartis is embarking on a journey to enhance its core technology infrastructure by introducing new digital tools and ways of working that will simplify how we work, drive operational excellence, and improve our suppliers' experience. This includes platforms for supplier requests, self-service registration, and onboarding, Master Data Governance-Suppliers (MDG-S) for maintaining our data, and a new Supplier Portal, which will act as a gateway for information and support for doing business with Novartis.
Methodology
​​​​​​​#1 UX Strategy - team onboarding
We started embarking on the journey by embedding ourselves (UX) with the subchapter - Supplier Experience team. As we began to gain a better perspective of the program landscape, an E2E strategy was defined. the 'T' shaped plan would start off with setting the knowledge foundations and as part of our primary research we would start building Personas + Empathy Maps With this knowledge, we would then identify products within the Supplier experience where we could show the value of these insights by translating these insights into delightful experiences.
#2 Persona Segmentation Workshop Kickoff

In 90 mins online workshop we were able to unpack the Supplier experience customer groups. A total of 6 main customer groups from the Supplier experience landscape were identified as the starting point of the exercise: Requestor, p2p back office, Procurement, TPRM, Suppliers, and business owners.
The tool used: Miro

Core thinking (Diamond)
Create choices:
Through one divergent exercise we ‘unpacked’ these customer groups, by identifying potential personas for each group and their basic characteristics.

Make choices:
Through one convergent exercise, we voted on Supplier experience personas that had the most impact and potential, which should be the focus of user interviews. From here, a set of most voted personas were extracted and in our hands, we had a hierarchical persona list.
#3 Three-step process 
Identify Personas
By engaging with country SPOCs and seeking their assistance in the identification of interviewees and scheduling the interviews themselves. A set of 10 -20 participants per persona group was requested. Once we had the names and contact details a pre-read email was sent to all potential participants explaining our work and expectations from the participants, and the interview slots were finalized through the team's calendar.
Empathize
These semi-structured interviews were essentially informal chats with the people doing the job, their associated context, their goals, pain points, challenges, aspirations, hopes, and fears. We created a psychologically safe environment for these participants, ensuring anonymity and encouraging participants to 'tell us lit it is....'
Synthesize
The gathered data that identify real user problems including complexities that might benefit from simplification was then aggregated on our Miro board to begin the work of synthesizing. By analyzing the data from all these interviews and integrating it with any additional insights previously gathered by the program, we carefully clustered and themed them into relevant categories. Out of these emerged the supplier personas.

Release and Iterate
Every emerging persona was socialized and tested with the project teams in large forums. The feedback received in these forums is then amended and adjusted in line before being finalized and ready to use in design thinking workshops and other program activities.
#4 Leveraging the mindset into a product
By leveraging the insights and pain points from personas we would build a simplified and automated supplier onboarding experience, enabling self-service and smooth integration with associates, it will mean improved process visibility, making it faster and easier to gather supplier data, while new self-service capabilities will mean a better overall experience for suppliers. 
The objective was to deliver:
A best-in-class supplier onboarding solution. Supplier self-service portal designed with suppliers' first mindset, including state-of-the-art self-registration and onboarding flows.

UI design
The design process was driven by two main goals:
how can we reduce inquiries volume?
How can we create better transparency with our users?

By combining the goals with design best practices and leveraging the tested UI design kit (OneDS). We were able to fast-track the UI design process and eventually craft an application design flow that would help users perform tasks that they do in real life with a delightful experience.
Conclusion

With the team of 4 UX practitioners assigned to the initiative, we were able to run constant peer reviews that proved valuable in delivering a flawless output. Due to frequent collaboration, we were able to narrow down, multiple factors with the business stakeholders and deliver quality design assets at each milestone completion.

With more time, I would have liked to focus on making the persona catalogs living and breathing by documenting these materials on a centralized platform or confluence, so product teams use them not just as a time read, but for every user story and would like to put some more focus on adaptive design.

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