Why don’t pharma companies focus on patient insights on their disease awareness websites?

I’ve got Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS), a chronic disease that causes inflammation of the joints. Sometimes it hurts like hell, yes, but here a few other things to my disease apart from pain:

• I don’t personally know anyone else who has AS
• I get a whole lot of symptoms but no one I read about on forums seems to have the same combination of symptoms as me
• I need to maintain a positive attitude and accept AS as a part of my life
• I worry that people think I am faking my disease so that I can get out of stuff
• And lots, lots more…

So what’s my point here? This blog isn’t a place for disease sufferers to air their thoughts. My point is that these are my insights about my disease. They are patient insights – small nuggets of reality for a patient that are not necessarily common knowledge to non-patients.

Consumer packaged goods marketers spend millions researching consumer insights and focus on these in virtually everything they do: online activities, advertising, packaging, product development, in store etc. But in the pharmaceutical industry this often doesn’t seem to be the case. For example, many disease awareness websites offer a medical overview of a disease but don’t contain much in the way of insights. You may get a patient story with an insight or two (this is a good start) but often you don’t even get these. I wonder sometimes how often real patients have been involved in the development of these sites.

I think pharma and healthcare is missing a trick. Well researched patient insights would make for much more relevant, engaging and useful disease awareness sites. What’s more, the patient insights are out there for the taking. The disease forums are full of them.

An argument in favour of taxonomy

We’ve been talking about the usefulness (or otherwise) of taxonomy in automated content management at Content Formula recently.

At its most basic level, taxonomy allows pieces of content to appear in the most relevant sections of a site.

For example if the Financial Times wanted to publish an article about a European government bailing out an energy firm with a big complex loan, the editor might decide to make the content appear in three different sections of the site – Europe, Finance, and Energy. Instead of publishing it three times, he simply needs to tag it correctly for it to appear in the three sections.

Among the disadvantages of taxonomy are that it can be over-complex where simplicity is required. And when you create a taxonomy it must mean something to the reader, and ultimately must speed his or her journey to the information they’re looking for. Creating meaningful (semantic) taxonomies isn’t always easy.

But this sentence from Nielsen’s Alertbox today is a great argument in favour of using taxonomy to make sure content can be found in the right place, at least in a big intranet:

“…at JPMorgan Chase, the intranet homepage is viewed 620,000 times per day, so even one superfluous headline that required one second to scan would cost the company the equivalent of 22 full-time employees in lost productivity.”

The rest is here.

David Harbottle

Today is World Usability Day

One of the central events is “the world’s first 36 hour global expert review on a number of leading websites and products”, and is designed to highlight the importance of usability in designs which are intended for international use.

This is meat and drink to Content Formula, since we have lots of international clients and we’re always looking to make sure their website content works in every country . So we’ll be watching out with a critical eye for the results of the expert review, and hopefully getting a summary onto this blog when they’re published.

 Here’s a link to the World Usability Day website.

And here’s a link to some photos of Usability Man – a superhero slated for a 3pm appearance in London’s Oxford Street today.

David Harbottle

HTML Newsletters and the Email Client

Test, test, and test again. It’s possible that such an adage has never been so fitting as this example is to the sphere of Information Technology. With different systems, assorted architectures and various languages everywhere, it’s not always easy to ensure that consistency prevails.

HTML newsletters, for example, continue to be popular and effective tools for electronic marketing. However, consistent display of your lovingly put together HTML by the numerous email clients out the there is hard to achieve. In fact, it is even less predictable than the way in which web sites are displayed by different web browser platforms.

Consequently, it is always best practice to test the email by sending it to a number of popular email clients, including those which are web based such as Yahoo!, Hotmail, and G-mail. When testing such programs it’s a fair assumption that regional variations need not be tested and if the newsletter is being displayed correctly within yahoo.co.uk, for example, that it will look identical in the inbox of a yahoo.fr user. However, our experience has indicated that this is not the case!

When recently testing an email newsletter for a large cosmetics firm, it was discovered that yahoo.co.uk interprets the html code ™ as expected, displaying the trademark symbol (™). The French version of the same email client, on the other hand, ignored the code completely and displayed no symbol at all. In order to force the client to display the ™ symbol it was necessary to enter the number pad command ALT+0153 whilst editing the html code directly. So, if you thought knocking up an html newsletter for a varied audience would be hassle free then think again!

What can be done then to ensure that all recipients see your article as you intended? A sensible, and widely used, solution is to upload a copy of the newsletter as a web page and offer the recipient the option to view the bulletin in their browser. With so many different email clients to cater for, opting for this method seems the most realistic and efficient solution.

John Scott