A vaccine purchasing platform: what the category taught us before users did

DESIGN STRATEGIST | CREATIVE SCIENCE FOR JOHNSON & JOHNSON | 2022

Johnson & Johnson wanted to build a direct purchasing platform for vaccines. The people who buy vaccines are clinic coordinators, formulary committees, and physicians, and at the time they were ordering through experiences that hid the information they needed and repeated work they had already done. The question was what a better platform should actually do, and why.

The risk on a project like this is the shortcut everyone reaches for. Someone says "let's build an Uber for vaccines," the room agrees, and the work becomes a copy of a product built for a different problem. We built the process to prevent that.

Approach

Three stages, each answering what the next one needed.

Getting smart

I started inside the organization, interviewing stakeholders to understand business goals and what they already believed about purchasers and the market. In parallel I assembled a shortlist of digital platforms worth learning from, chosen for the problems they solved rather than the industries they sat in.

User research

Twelve interviews with vaccine purchasers about how they buy today on competitor manufacturer sites, where the process fails them, and what they would change. A partner firm, Cello, moderated. Clearing a new vendor through J&J would have taken longer than the timeline allowed and Cello was already approved, so my colleague and I wrote the protocol and the stimuli, sat in on every session, and ran the synthesis.

UX mapping

I mapped the purchasing journey for each primary user group, built the personas behind them, and ran an opportunity workshop that took stakeholders through the findings and into the gaps.

The exemplar move

Before user research, I ran a workshop with J&J stakeholders built on a specific reframe. The trap in this kind of project is starting from a product you admire and reverse-engineering a reason to copy it. So the session opened by naming that trap, then reversed it: start from where a business need and a user need overlap, and let the solution come out of that intersection.

We studied five platforms outside healthcare, each pulled apart the same way: who it serves, the use case, what the feature says about the customer's underlying need, whether vaccine competitors already do it, and the behavioral principle that makes it work.

To keep the conversation from collapsing into taste, I plotted them on two axes. How innovative a platform is relative to the others, and how much human support it needs to run. The car metaphor gave stakeholders a shared handle, and a room of people with different instincts got one picture to point at.

What we heard

Twelve purchasers, sorted into four roles with genuinely different relationships to the purchase. The clearest split was in what each one wanted from a vendor.

The pain was consistent and specific. Search returned too many results with too little of the right information. Billing and shipping details had to be re-entered on every order despite the same order repeating. Formulary, regulation, and supply chain changes arrived late and by email. Inventory tracking was manual and error-prone, so clinics ran low without meaning to.

From insight to recommendation

The journey maps are where the work resolves. Each one runs from account setup to order arrival, and at every stage it separates two kinds of recommendation: what purchasers asked for, and what we proposed on top with the evidence behind it.

Making it tangible

We built the recommendations into mockups so the ideas could be reacted to rather than imagined, and structured the stimuli as opposing pairs. Framing concepts as poles rather than options gives people a position to take, which surfaces preference faster than asking whether something is good.

Where it landed

The engagement ended at handoff. We delivered the personas, journey maps, feature recommendations, and mockups, and the decision about what to build sat with J&J from there. I do not have visibility into what shipped.

What the client had at the end was a clear account of how purchasers buy today and a documented reason behind every feature we put forward.

Reflection

The exemplar work is the part I would carry into any project now. Studying platforms outside the category gave stakeholders permission to think past what vaccine competitors already do, and grounding each one in a behavioral principle kept the conversation on why something works rather than whether we liked it.

The other lesson is about structuring a recommendation. Separating what users asked for from what we advise, and attaching a reason and a precedent to everything in the second group, made the advice reviewable. Anyone could see where a proposal came from and argue with it on the merits.