How HeliosX streamlines UX research in medical ecommerce with Lyssna

HeliosX is transforming the online pharmacy landscape with its innovative approach to medical treatments across the UK and the USA. It operates multiple brands under its umbrella, (including MedExpress, ZipHealth, Dermatica, RocketRX and Levity) each catering to different customer needs and profiles. As a result, HeliosX faces unique challenges in designing its product and engaging customers.

With the company representing various brands, Andy Blount, Head of Product Design, explains how the team is structured so that each product and content designer works on all the brands. This way, every designer knows the nuances of the medical treatments on offer and understands each brand's specific customer profile. 

With more than 20 years of experience under his belt, Andy recognizes the need for a robust user research tool to streamline design processes, target various demographics, and improve customer outcomes. He shares his journey from introducing Lyssna to the team and how they were able to build efficient research processes and drive impactful design decisions.

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Challenge

When Andy joined HeliosX in 2021, he encountered a significant challenge: the absence of a structured usability testing and research process. At that time, the company had no dedicated tools or methods for gathering user feedback. The structure of the team and the nature of the products added to the complexity. 

Andy suggested Lyssna, which he’d used in a previous role, and “brought it in fairly quickly after I started.” 

Solution

“I brought in Lyssna because, for me, it's the fastest way that I can do usability testing, and it's really easy to target customers, which is another big thing,” shares Andy. 

Lyssna was quickly integrated into the HeliosX design workflow, enabling the team to conduct various tests, including card sorting, prototype testing, and preference testing. One of the key advantages was the ability to get rapid results.

“I can essentially mock up something, stick it into Lyssna, kick off a test, and get the results back in 20 minutes,” says Andy. This agility has allowed the team to iterate quickly and make informed design decisions.

According to Andy, their main jobs to be done are:

• Usability testing: Creating prototypes and testing user flows to ensure they make sense and are easy to navigate.

• Comprehension testing: Evaluating the clarity of medical questionnaire copy to make sure it’s easy to understand for users who aren’t medically trained professionals. 

Andy shares a specific example of how important message testing has been.

“As we're in a medical space, we can't prescribe a product unless people have answered a medical questionnaire. It’s part of the purchase process, part of the checkout funnel. 

Historically, it had been written by ‌prescribers and ended up being incredibly hard for a normal person to understand. So, we're introducing a process where we're incorporating feedback from people who match our customer demographics and getting them to tell us if it makes sense.”

Andy adds that Lyssna, “Improves our designs or our outcomes for customers. Even if you think a design is a hundred percent perfect, it doesn't need testing, it's so simple. By testing, somebody is going to spot something because you're working with a larger panel.”

“And depending on how you structure the survey questions off the back of it, you can find out a lot of related information. So even if we're doing a simple test, we can find out things in a more generative way for future work.”

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Results

A regulatory change in the UK required HeliosX to modify how they presented products to customers. Their challenge was to make sure that users didn’t think they had chosen a product before completing the mandatory consultation questionnaire.

Through multiple rounds of testing, Andy and the design team discovered a crucial insight: users were confused by the term “consultation” on call-to-action buttons. Many believed they would need to visit a GP or receive a phone call after completing the questionnaire. 

“It was kind of a revelation,” Andy recalls. This feedback prompted the team to reconsider their terminology and improve the clarity of the user interface.

Andy also shares how the team has used Lyssna for initial research. "Towards the end of last year, when we launched a new brand in the USA focused on weight loss medication, we used Lyssna to understand what people thought was important when looking for weight loss medication. This was crucial for shaping how we talk about our brand and where we position it in the market,” shared Andy. 

Another significant outcome was achieved using open card sorting. “The results pushed the company to actually restructure how we position men’s sexual health,” adds Andy.

The goal was to restructure the categories for men’s sexual health products, which were previously labeled ‘erectile dysfunction’ and ‘premature ejaculation.’ “The open card sort we conducted suggested a more user-friendly grouping, leading to the adoption of the term ‘sexual health.’”

“Internally, we've renamed the whole structure of that treatment,” adds Andy, highlighting how ‌user research influenced broader business decisions.

The success of HeliosX’s design initiatives highlights the importance of continuous user feedback and the value of having a reliable, efficient tool like Lyssna to support it.