Field research, stakeholder evangelism, interaction design, and Axure prototyping across a series of Enbrel apps.
Foundations · 2016 / AbelsonTaylor
Pharma sales UX
The best sales tool is the one a rep will actually open.
Before Airspace, I was a senior UX designer at AbelsonTaylor, a healthcare advertising agency. Pharma brands were spending millions on iPad “sales aids” for their reps, and, by the industry’s own research, a large share of reps never opened them. I took on Amgen’s Enbrel apps and led the case to rethink the format itself: fewer pages, and memorable interactions built for the two minutes a rep actually gets with a physician.
The earliest clear version of a pattern I still work by: read the signal under the request, name the real job, and build the smaller thing that lets everyone else see it too.
By a widely cited industry study, roughly a third of reps never launched the interactive aids their brands paid to build.
Physicians asked for brevity and relevance. The apps offered a fifty-page flip-book for a two-minute talk.
A lighter format reps chose to use, one that opened a stream of new work for the agency.
Timeline
The artifact / Try it
The apps this replaced were fifty-page flip-books built for a presentation nobody sat through. This is the whole aid: ask the physician to commit to a guess, then show them how far off they were.
A quick friendly game makes the real number stick. That is the entire interaction, and it is why reps chose to open it.
- 01Drag to your answer. The patients fill in as you go.
- 02Lock it in. No changing your mind after.
- 03See the real number, and your guess beside it.
Important safety informationPrescribing informationMedication guideInstructions for use
Out of 99 patients, how many showed no joint-damage progression after two years?
Measured radiographically. Make the physician commit before you show them anything.
50Patients
099
Actual answer
77 / 99
See the data →
patients showed no disease progression.
Important safety information
Regulatory copy omitted — placeholder, not real labelling.
Redrawn from a 2016 Axure prototype. AbelsonTaylor · Amgen Enbrel.
01 / The signal
An expensive tool nobody would open.
The rep call is a strange design problem: a busy, skeptical physician; maybe two minutes; and a sales rep holding an iPad app meant to explain a drug. When I started on Amgen’s Enbrel apps in 2016, the tools were built for a world that doesn’t exist, one where a physician sits quietly through a fifty-page presentation. So reps did the rational thing. Industry research put it bluntly: a large share of them were literally never opening the apps at all.
I went looking for why, using what I had, time spent shadowing physicians, friends who were reps and doctors, and colleagues who had ridden along on sales calls. The physicians were consistent. Asked what would make these tools better, they put brevity and relevance at the top of the list. The apps were failing because they were designed to present everything, when the job was to help two people talk about one thing.
A tool nobody opens has a research problem, not a polish problem.
Typical rep app / architectureOne path, front to back
- 01Splash1
- 02Home2
- 03Goals of therapy6
- 04Trial design5
- 05Efficacy14
- 06Safety2
- 07Dosing1
- 08Access & support3
- 09Summary1
- 10Disease state19
50+Pages to navigate
2 minThe whole conversation
02 / The move
Change the tool by changing the process.
Knowing the answer was not the hard part; getting a different app built was. At a pharma agency, UX usually arrives after the content is set, so you inherit a bulky deck and tidy its edges. To make something smaller, I had to move upstream, and change two things at once: what the teams believed a sales aid should be, and what we actually put in front of the client.
It started as evangelism. I kept close tabs on outside research and used it, alongside my own field notes, to show account and creative teams that the apps had a real problem. In client presentations I would float a lighter approach as a “next version,” framing it as more work to buy rather than a critique of the work we had done. Eventually one account pair, with a trusted Amgen relationship, was willing to try. We reworked the plan to skip the heavy architecture phase and spend the time where it mattered: sketching, wireframing, and prototyping.
Make the case with proof, not taste.
Turn outside research and field observation into a short, pointed argument, so “smaller” arrived backed by evidence.
Build the idea people can react to.
Interactive Axure prototypes at the right fidelity, simple metaphors a physician grasps in seconds: guess-and-reveal, tap-through, move-the-iPad.
Present lo-fi, with expectations set.
Walk stakeholders through rough prototypes so they could stress-test a real thing and choose with open eyes.
The artifact / Try it
The same move in a different shape. Rather than counting patients, you drag a bar to predict how the drug did on its own.
Lo-fi on purpose. What was being tested was the interaction, not the polish: will a physician commit to a number in front of a rep? The panel said yes, and bought the thinking for more apps.
- 01Drag to set your prediction.
- 02Make your guess.
- 03See where the real number landed.
Important safety informationPrescribing informationMedication guideInstructions for use
Important safety information
Regulatory copy omitted — placeholder, not real labelling.
Redrawn from a 2016 Axure prototype. Figures are illustrative.
03 / What changed
The reps picked it themselves.
The client took the prototypes to their own internal panel of reps, the real test. Word came back fast: the reps did not want to choose just one; they wanted this kind of thinking carried into more apps. A lighter, more conversational format had won on the merits, with the people who would have to carry it into the room.
Amgen opened several new projects to carry the approach forward, hundreds of thousands of dollars of new work for the agency.
Interactive prototypes moved into new-business pitches, where they helped win work the old format couldn’t.
The format became a repeatable stream of smaller, more innovative sales aids the team could actually ship.
04 / What it taught me
Find the signal. Build the proof.
None of this began as a product-leadership assignment. It began with a UX designer noticing that an expensive thing was not being used, and refusing to treat that as a styling problem. Get close enough to name the real job, then build the smaller thing that lets everyone else see it too. I have been working that way ever since, next at iAquaLink, and then across seven years at Airspace.