Reaching customers around the world with the information they need
Redesigning a marketing website to speak to an international audience, bring more customers in the door, and better articulate the client’s capabilities.
RESULTS
4.6 / 5
120%
Average visitor rating of the site’s value by the end of the project (up from 3.7/5)
Increase in the number of customers visiting the site
Background
As I joined this project, I was told that this client was “the biggest company you’ve never heard of.” At their core, they acted as a pharmaceutical distributor: transporting drugs and medical products from manufacturers to pharmacies and hospitals around the world. However, they also offered a myriad of other services, from helping pharmaceutical manufacturers bring drugs to market, to supporting mom and pop pharmacies in marketing their business.
Complicating things further, this client had recently undergone a major acquisition of a competitor, sparking the need for a rebrand and website redesign. Our team was brought onboard to with a few goals: clearly articulate the client’s capabilities, redesign the site to speak to a global audience, and bring more customers in the door.
The challenge was this client was large and siloed, so there was no single source of truth for their capabilities, especially as you looked outside the US. Everyone talked about what they did differently and each country had their own way of marketing and regulations to adhere to.
As a baseline, we found that only 5% of visitors to the site were customers, with job seekers making up the largest percentage of visitors at 47%. Visitors were rating the value of the site at about 3.7/5.
Role
Sr. Product Designer
Experience design, wireframing, prototyping, component library creation, design system support, WCAG accessibility standards
Timeframe
July 2024 - September 2025
Industry
Pharmaceutical distribution
Deliverables
50+ new pages on the marketing site, available in six languages
Approach
As this was planned to be a long term engagement (2+ years total), our approach was iterative and evolved over time. Fundamentally, we wanted to ground our designs in feedback from the users, and continuously improve to meet our KPIs.
Align and strategize
Collaborate with the client to understand what they can do, where they can do it, and who they can do it for. Dive deeper to learn what customers are looking for and how best to speak to the different needs of each country.
Ideate and prototype
Based on initial customer insights, create prototypes illustrating the new experience. Test these prototypes with real customers, and incorporate their feedback directly.
Design and deploy
Build upon the wireframes to create high fidelity visual designs which incorporate accessibility best practices and address user needs. Iteratively deploy the new pages, tracking performance for continuous improvements
Align and strategize
The first hurdle for our team to tackle was understanding all of the client’s capabilities, how they related to each other, who they were relevant for, and where they were available. Our Product Owner (PO) led the charge, coordinating across siloed business units to come up with a clear structure of the client’s capabilities and the products/services they sold to their customers.
We quickly discovered that capabilities vary wildly across each country and each country has different rules and regulations they need to disclose when going to market. However, only displaying the capabilities country by country felt limiting and would not align with all user’s mental models.
We opted for a three pronged approach: talk about what we do by capability, by customer type, and by country, with cross links to the specific products or services customers can buy embedded within each.
Ideate and prototype
With the three pronged strategy defined, my primary focus shifted to the global portion of the site. This section consisted of three levels: an overview of our global roach, a overview of the region, and country specific pages.
In our initial discussions, we debated if all three of these levels were necessary. To validate our approach, our research team conducted a competitive analysis and interviewed actual customers from around the globe to get their feedback.
Research findings
Our team approached the research study with two goals: understand how others in the industry talk about their capabilities around the globe, and understand what exactly customers are looking for in order to move forward in the funnel.
For the first goal, our team did a competitive analysis, looking at others in the pharmaceutical distribution space, as well as outside of the industry. They found that most of the client’s competitors did not differentiate their offerings by country, only offering the same content translated into different languages. A handful created microsites for each country or region.
At this juncture, we were confronted with a challenge: do we change our approach to align with the industry standard? Or do we stick with our three level approach given the client’s deep global presence?
This is where the customer interviews came into play. Our team interviewed 12 customers from 6 different countries. Overall, the three level approach resonated with them, though most anticipated jumping straight into the country page if possible. Our templates provided most of the information they needed, with a few gaps:
Customers were looking for links to their country’s specific eCommerce platform(s)
The link to the general contact us form felt impersonal, and customers were concerned their inquiries wouldn’t get addressed
Customers were looking for the ability to find a location in their country from these pages
Incorporating the feedback
From that research, we found that our proposed approach largely resonated with users, however concerns about the site’s customer support resources came through loud and clear.
As I explored adding those resources to the country pages, it felt like we were burying content that could be used by a wider audience. I introduced a new Help Center and Sign In feature which would be available in the global navigation.
Our Help Center would answer common questions for customers and provide the contact information for different support channels used throughout the client’s businesses. For MVP, this would be a simple list, though for the future state we planned to make it searchable.
The Sign In page would be a one-stop-shop for the 31+ digital products used by the client’s customers. For MVP, this would also be a simple list, however we planned launch shortcuts to the most frequently used platforms once we were able to track the performance data.
Lastly, I designed a brand-wide location finder which customers could use to find one of this client’s locations anywhere in the world.
Design and deploy
Given the number of country-specific pages that needed to be created, we worked with local marketers iteratively to build out and launch each page as it was ready. Additionally, I created a full component library for the design team to use, replicating this client’s Sitecore instance.
MVP versions of the new customer support pages were launched, with the Sign In page becoming the third most visited page on the entire site.
Conclusion
The length of this project really gave me time to sink my teeth into the site. It was incredibly rewarding to be able to see the performance of the pages we were launching over time, so that we could continue to make improvements. Although the global/country pages were just a subset of the designs I made, they presented a unique challenge which I wanted to highlight here.
By the end of the project in September 2025, we saw in increase in visitor’s value of the site from 3.7 to 4.6/5. We also saw a big increase in the percentage of visitors who identified themselves as customers, from only 5% to 20% of visitors, hitting one of the client’s main KPIs.
FROM THE CLIENT
“Kirsten has been an exceptional addition to our team since joining just a few months ago. She seamlessly integrated into our workflow and quickly demonstrated her value…
Her initiative and leadership in this area have been truly commendable. Kirsten’s positivity, collaborative spirit, and impressive design skills have made her an incredible asset to our team”