Before the introduction of Alloy, SmithRx faced significant challenges in managing its pharmaceutical data. The organization relied on a fragmented system of spreadsheets and various data repositories—a system that proved labor-intensive, inefficient, and ill-suited to the company's specialized programs and business needs. This fragmented approach increased operational costs while creating more data inconsistencies and workflow inefficiencies.
Company
SmithRx
Year
2023
Role
Lead Product Designer
Skills
Cross-org collaboration, stakeholder management, prototyping
Our goal was to create a centralized platform for managing SmithRx's pharmaceutical data in order to improve operational efficiency and ensure data uniformity.
During Alloy's development, we were simultaneously managing a company rebrand and creating a new design system. This parallel effort provided an ideal testing ground for refining our design components. Note: All designs in this case study utilize hypothetical data to preserve confidentiality.
Our hypothesis: By centralizing and supporting intuitive data management, operational efficiencies and data accuracy will increase, saving valuable time of internal team members and reducing business cost.
With hundreds of columns and thousands of rows of data to manage, we focused our design strategy on three key areas: efficiency, error tolerance, and repetitive use. Our goal was simple—show users exactly the data they need, nothing more.
Through careful error prevention and graceful error handling, we built user trust. We enhanced usability further by introducing presets—customizable table views that provided role-specific data access.
Despite navigating organizational changes and evolving requirements during development, Alloy successfully delivered efficient data management through custom viewing options, robust editing tools, and comprehensive historical logs. The tool is now deployed to our "super users" for testing and feedback.
Key learnings
1. Ask the experts First and foremost, I had to acknowledge that I wasn't an expert in pharmaceutical data management. To effectively design for and collaborate with those who were, I needed to embrace a mindset of humility and curiosity. 2. Workflow sensitivity While streamlining workflows and creating efficiency sounds ideal, having to re-learn how to do your job is both difficult and frustrating. Redesigning workflows requires close communication with users to understand the line between innovative and unapproachable. Sometimes, a step toward "better" is more valuable than a leap toward "best." 3. Keep moving forward: Iterate as you go With such a complex product being built from scratch, we often felt tempted to pause progress whenever we encountered new insights or obstacles. To maintain momentum, we learned to stay focused on immediate tasks while carefully planning future iterations at key milestones.
Credits
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