ACE at Alexion

Problem

On Alexion’s old internal site, while someone could search any of the 10+ departments and navigate to different pages, there was little information on each department. It was essentially a dead end for users within the company looking to learn more, whether it be contact information or additional resources and stories. Given the departments worked closely together to achieve the same goal - changing the lives of patients who were living with rare diseases - something needed to be done to show this greater connection.

Site Map

For each of the three different sites my team worked on, we scratched the old site map and figured out a way to account for every new page and link them all together more efficiently. This optimized overall navigation time and allowed for less dead ends and confusion.

Design Goal

Once the main problem was addressed, the design goals were established. The main goal was to enhance the overall usability so that a large percentage of users would find the site easy to use and navigate. The second most important design goal was to keep each site consistent and cohesive, especially when it came to the overall look and feel. Lastly, changes would be regularly made to the site, whether it was adding internal news stories or blog posts, or swapping out images, so maintainability was key.

Wireframes

With the site map and design goals ready to go, I knocked out the wireframes for the three sites.

Conclusion

The day before the soft launch, I saw that most of my work had been changed to mimic the work done on the other sites. In the end, although I felt disappointed, it really pushed me to tap back into my user experience design skills and made me realize that this was what I wanted a full time career in, and is what I do now.