Designing a disease-first oncology hub around HCP mental models

Our client, an Oncology Business Unit within a top 10 global pharmaceutical organisation, had built up dozens of separate product and disease sites for oncology, each with its own design, content and upkeep. They were considering developing a new hub to bring them together, but before committing further budget to full design and development, they needed proof it would improve the experience for the HCPs it was built for.

We ran 18 sixty-minute usability sessions with senior oncologists, testing an interactive prototype across desktop and mobile. The core question was structural: organise the hub around products, the way most brand sites are, or around disease and indication, the way HCPs actually think through a treatment decision? HCPs consistently moved from disease to indication to product, not the reverse, so an indication-led structure won out, alongside a fix for the Important Safety Information (ISI) compliance problem that had stalled the previous concept.

By the end of the project, the client had already committed to the next phase. What started as a go/no-go evaluation became a case for how to build it properly, and the report shifted with it, from a decision document into material the client's own team could use to secure buy-in from their wider stakeholders.

ISI was flagged as the single biggest risk to the project before it started. With multiple products, indications and claims sitting on one site, the previous concept had struggled to show safety information without it taking over the page, and hadn't found a version that was both compliant and usable.

We approached it as a content problem rather than a design patch, thinking carefully about what needed to be visible, when, and to whom, as an HCP moved through the journey. In testing, our solutions had no negative impact on usability, and most HCPs didn't mention it unprompted at all.

By the final weeks of the project, the team had stopped treating ISI as a risk. It had gone from the hardest problem on the brief to something nobody thought to ask about anymore, which was exactly the point.

Pharma teams draw clear internal lines between promotional and medical content, between one brand and another, and between departments that manage different parts of a website. Testing showed  HCPs experience that split very differently. Where pharma sees two separate worlds, one commercial and one clinical, each governed by its own approvals and its own site, HCPs just see one search for the information relevant to their patient. Whether that information technically sits on the "promotional" side or the "medical" side of the business isn't something they're tracking, or something they should have to.

A few things stood out consistently. HCPs move fluidly between disease, indication and product as they think through a case, and expect a site to keep pace rather than forcing them down one path. They want a quick, scannable answer first, with the option to go deeper only when they need to. And they have little patience for structure that reflects how a pharma organisation is set up internally rather than how a clinical decision actually unfolds.

These findings shaped our content strategy for the hub: build around what an HCP is trying to do in the moment, not around internal categories.