Overview

Eli Lilly, a global pharmaceutical company, sought to increase market share by launching Lilly Play, an on-demand educational platform. The goal was to better inform healthcare professionals and sales representatives about Lilly’s products, usage scenarios, and industry innovations through video content, including case studies shared by doctors themselves.

Lilly Play aimed to modernize the traditional sales-rep-led promotion model by offering a scalable, digital complement to face-to-face visits. The platform would help doctors stay updated on treatments in a less intrusive way and support sales reps in building trust and credibility during conversations with physicians.

My Role

As the lead UX researcher, I was responsible for:
 

• Validating whether there was real demand for Lilly Play

• Identifying personas, use cases, and user journeys

• Supporting the product and marketing teams with insights to optimize onboarding and engagement
   

Research Approach

Stakeholder Interviews

• I started with internal interviews to clarify the company’s vision, assumptions about users, and strategic goals for Lilly Play. This helped align the research scope and uncover early hypotheses to test.
   

User Interviews & Surveys

• I conducted interviews with Eli Lilly’s sales reps and doctors from various specialties to understand how they currently consume educational content, their preferred sources, and their willingness to adopt a new platform.

• Two distinct personas emerged:

  • Passive updaters: Preferred periodicals and curated content

  • Active seekers: Enjoyed case studies and practical applications
     

Behavioral Research & Optimization

With the MVP launched, we moved into optimization. However, traffic was initially low, so we focused on:
 

• Promoting the platform through targeted email campaigns

• Running Hotjar surveys to learn more about user motivations and preferences

• Using this behavioral data to create personalized homepage variations aligned with the two personas

• Conducting A/B tests on key landing pages to improve registration and engagement rates

• Engaging non-users:
  To bring in new users, I ran additional surveys through email with non-Lilly Play users across the organization. These responses helped us understand adoption barriers and informed new customization and outreach strategies.
   

Results & Impact
 

• We validated strong interest in Lilly Play, particularly when content was tailored to different learning styles.

• Personas and journeys shaped homepage customizations and content structure.

• User engagement grew: we saw increases in both registrations and video plays after tailoring outreach and optimizing key pages.

• The platform MVP was retained and continues to be used internally, supporting the sales enablement strategy and doctor education efforts.
   

Why It Mattered
 

This project proved how UX research can guide product direction, content strategy, and marketing efforts, even in low-traffic, highly specialized B2B contexts.