A Digital Facelift for an Aesthetic Medicine Consultation Group
Allergan Access Website Redesign
OVERVIEW
Allergan Access is a consulting firm and educational platform that offers a web-based suite of practice management tools, articles, and distance learning courses for medical practices within the aesthetic medicine specialty.
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.
Discovery
Discovery is the cornerstone of every successful project, and we recognized from the beginning how important it would be to understand Allergan’s unique business model. We conducted several stakeholder interviews to kick off the project and get a full explanation of their current system before doing anything else.
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.
before
UX Strategy
Since scalability was a major need for Allergan’s new online platform, we focused the majority of our UX strategy on building UX patterns that would be flexible and scalable as Allergan’s needs shift in the future. To do this, we did a full audit of the content currently on their site, and broke it into distinct UX content modules. To future-proof the list of modules, we ran them through multiple potential business scenarios to ensure they would be scalable for the company in the future.
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.
Build
Allergan had a very comprehensive brand guide that clearly defined the logo usage, fonts, and color palette we needed to adhere to. Applying their brand guidelines to the wireframed template pages brought life to the UX patterns we created.
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.
Test & Launch
With the site developed, the next step in the process is to test. With so many complexities in the site build, it was incredibly important to do exhaustive testing. Everyone from our quality assurance team, developers, designer, project managers, and most importantly, the client ran through every imaginable scenario to make sure the site was functioning correctly.
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.
Closing Thoughts
Allergan came to us with a challenging product and a deep desire to improve their digital presence. We were able to deliver all that and more with a user-friendly platform that allows them to put their focus on business growth and an even more beautiful future.
View Site Download PDF
Next up
