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Expertise Overview
Designed for aesthetic medicine clinics of any size, Allergan provides a variety of resources to help clinics improve their performance. While Allergan offers a wealth of knowledge to their clients, their old website lacked usability and wasn’t aesthetically pleasing.
We worked with Allergan to develop a visually stunning and technically functional website focused primarily on being scalable and user friendly.
Because their old site had been cobbled together as they expanded business offerings and hadn’t been built with scalability in mind, we had a lot to discuss. There was a lot of complexity built into their user group hierarchies, their website roles, and the product access that they needed according to different subscription options. We spent the majority of our time during the discovery phase understanding the user journey of each group on the site, and how all the different touch points needed to work together.
Another major part of our discovery was spent exploring the 3rd party Learning Management System (LMS) Allergan wanted to integrate to manage all the distance learning courses they offered. We took a deep dive into their chosen LMS’s (Totara) capabilities and limitations to explore what could and couldn’t be done.
Once we had a full list of UX content modules, we wireframed a library of layouts that would become the foundational UX patterns used to build out any page needed by Allergan in the future. Combining these UX patterns allowed us to quickly wireframe the various page templates to demo how the system would work once developed.
Another major focus of this phase was planning out the ecommerce checkout flows. Due to the complexity of subscription options, it required extremely intentional planning to create an optimized experience that was quick and simple, and at the same time presented the complex subscription package options without overwhelming the potential customer.
After the design patterns were approved, we jumped into the front-end programming using HTML5 and CSS3. That was later integrated with the custom backend admin interface built on asp.NET. We collectively agreed that the best development approach was to program a completely custom build on the asp.NET framework due to Allergan’s complex business model and unique user requirements. Building our own custom .NET site also allowed us to tailor the ecommerce checkout flow for an optimized experience.
The last step of the build was to integrate the LMS. We worked closely with the Totara team to send user data and access privileges via their API and leveraged SFTP transfers of CSV files to make sure the user databases were always in sync between our site and Totara.
The most important component of this was double checking the user database import to ensure all of the users retained the same information they had on the legacy database and that their information was being sent to the LMS correctly.
Once all parties were confident there were no bugs to be found, we were ready to launch the site. This meant another import of the database to ensure all the most recent user information was imported. We imported the database successfully, passed the information to Totara, moved the site onto the client’s server, and launched the site.
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