AstraZeneca shows what science can do

Background

Scientists are in great demand. This was pretty much the case prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, but today, of course, it’s even greater.

What’s powering this demand? One big reason is an ever-growing need to make sense of the mass of data that our 21st Century world is capable of producing, and the potential that the insights can offer. 

The brief

AstraZeneca has long been aware of the opportunity of applying this for better disease understanding and for designing new therapies to address disease. But the demand for scientific research capability is growing everywhere. This is not least the case in the new science of data analysis, where the abilities to design research based on the scientists’ stock in trade – hypothesis-experiment-insight – is vital.

In the harsh competition for scientists, AstraZeneca wanted us to help them to become an even stronger magnet for talent.

The solution

We were engaged to help AstraZeneca improve the user experience on their website. Did the scientist feel truly well served and satisfied by their visit to the web pages that are devoted to the scientist? The answer was no. The problem was that nobody had thought through what visitors were truly after, and to answer that question, you needed to have well defined personas.

Our solution was to hold workshops to discover their preferred personas, which we held simultaneously at three AstraZeneca locations.

They also wanted to know how scientists perceived AstraZeneca and their competitors, and their preferred ways of acquiring information. Our solution was to hold a worldwide survey of scientists to discover and quantify their perceptions and preferences.

Was their website able to guide the scientist to the right information? Our solution was to completely redesign their website structure to make the information easy to follow, mobile friendly and optimally serve their scientist personas. Here are some examples:

What science can do

Our approach to R&D

Developing the next generation of drug delivery technologies

Finally, AstraZeneca have some really cutting edge ways of making medicines, which they called ‘drug modalities’. We rewrote these pages for clarity and excitement,  and to better match people’s search patterns on Google, the name was changed to 'Next Generation Therapeutics’.

The result

The result was the redesign of the web pages under the section What science can do and their groundbreaking in-house technologies under the section Next generation therapeutics (previously called Drug Modalities).

Then Covid-19 turned our world upside-down. AstraZeneca together with Oxford University pivoted and invented a new, temperature-stable vaccine against the virus, proving their innovative and entrepreneurial spirit beyond a shadow of doubt. At the time of writing, 2.8 billion doses of the vaccine have been ordered, making the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine the largest volume of doses on order in the world.

The new website content was:

• Easy to navigate
• Mobile friendly
• Search engine optimized
• Designed for R&D scientists