Shire.com

Enabling people with life-altering conditions to lead better lives.

Shire focuses on developing and delivering innovative medicines for patients with rare diseases and other specialty conditions. This might be a therapy to treat an extremely rare and life-threatening disease such as Hunter syndrome or Fabry disease, or a medicine for a specialist condition such as ADHD or ulcerative colitis.

The Challenge

To turn an outdated pharma site into a destination for healthcare advocates, patients and investors alike, interested in learning more about rare disease treatments and their development.

The Solution

Identify each of the personas we want to address and tailor content appropriately. Make the language, visuals and navigation easy to understand. Work with key stakeholders to produce a taxonomy and governance providing the site with a solid backbone on which to grow as their business continues to expand. Build on a CMS so that the site is easy to maintain.

The Results

A more robust, organized and effective tool to communicate with the intended audiences.

Redefining Architecture.

Shire’s site has a lot of content. Shire also has a very diverse audience. It was imperative to provide them with a navigational structure that worked for the business but more importantly, aided the different users on their specific journeys without alienating any of them.

We provided the user with a new level of visual consistently across the site. All of the primary level pages follow a similar way of introducing and delivering content. The organization, relationship between and access to many different pieces of content is a complex task. Taming this complexity for the user while still providing the business a means to display all of this content, is a function of deliberate planning, a rigorous information architecture process, and testing.

The Results.

Since the launch we’ve noticed that people are spending less time trying to figure out where to go and spending more time on the pages they intend to see. Our SEO strategy coupled with the organization of content and it’s presentation has helped some users find information specific to them and enter the site through pages other than the homepage. Overall, the site is benefiting more favorable numbers all around.