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Fused
The Fused Pharma Sim is a complete performance support tool designed to measure employee capabilities and provide their managers with the tools and guidance to help them coach more effectively.
My Roles
Creative Director
Product Strategy
UX Designer
Production
Motion & Animation
The Brief
Understanding how and when people are falling short in work performance is something often only discovered after the business has suffered. On discovery, these issues are often identified as employee issues when a larger systemic failing of their management is so often to blame.

The Fused Pharma Sim was imagined as a way to provide visibility into employee performance and provide a space for workplace practice without the risk of catastrophic business frictions.

For Coaches and Managers, this tool would need to not only collect and organize otherwise hard-to-collect performance data, it would need to provide context and guidance to lead them to coaching and improvement strategies.
The Problem(s)
KeepING it interesting
Crafting the right amount of difficulty and domain interest to draw the personal interest in employees in order to overcome the dread of “mandatory completion” and embrace the opportunity for self improvement.
ExpressING the value throughout
Creating an ecosystem of tools that connect sales reps, managers / coaches, and upper management so that performance data could find use and value throughout the process.
Simulating Real-World Workplace Interactions
It's not a stretch to try to simulate real-world work and pull data from the interaction. So much of our lives are lived through digital tools that the interaction metaphors that the simulation would borrow from would easily by recognizable by end users as they are already using them every day.
Email
Easy to intuit email inbox tools allow two-way conversation, reception of attachments and links to relevant subject matter, and create a repository for information that can be referenced throughout the experience.
Calls, Conversations  and Multi-Person Meetings
Individual and multi-person meetings and calls add the immediacy and urgency of a direct conversation.
Chat
Chat allows lengthy and complex exchanges without the production overhead associated with video or audio interactions.
Conversation Grading
A unique tool that lets participants play the role of coach - reviewing sales rep performance as they converse with physicians and seeing if they can find the strengths and weaknesses of those exchanges.
Story branching - the persistence of good (and bad) decisions.
Branching adds remarkable complexity and realism to simulation scenarios. As learners progress through the simulation, they are forced to make decisions that will shape the options and opinions that are available to them downstream - just as it happens in real life.
Selection
In a conversation with a Jr. Associate, the participant chooses a small team of advisors based on their roles and experience.
Discussion
In a subsequent meeting,  the chosen advisors weigh in to a discussion around physician priority.
Synthesis
When devising a territory plan,  synthesis will be informed heavily by their selection of advisors and what opinions and data they bring to the discussion - which may make or break the success of their strategy.
Codifying Sales Rep Performance
Where the rubber hits the road is in the value of the content through which we interface with our end-users. Several months of investigation combining in-house experts, partner SME’s, and informal interviews, we began to develop a a clear idea of where performance metrics could be centered, ultimately landing on a complete touchpoint panel that focused on 3 functional work skills with several sub-skills beneath those. By generating scenarios and questions with direct ties to these key touchpoints, we were meaningfully able to work against a comprehensive unifying strategy.
Sales Performance Scoring Matrix
13 essential performance KPIs for measuring and addressing on-the-job sales rep capabilities.
Scan & Analyze
Essential capabilities in gathering and parsing data, finding meaning, and synthesizing a point of view.
  • Identifies Customer Information
  • Identifies Market and Environmental Information
  • Identifies Market and Environmental Information
  • Analyzes Credibility and Likelihood of Data Point by Comparing It to Other Sources and Facts
Customer Engagement
Navigating customer conversations towards specific objectives.
  • Opening
  • Discovery
  • Demonstrates Capabilities
  • Objection Handling
  • Gaining Commitment
Territory Planning
Creating rational sales strategies around identified high-value customers and stakeholders.
  • Establishing Goals
  • Setting Objectives
  • Stakeholder Prioritization
  • Customer Knowledge
Identifying Users & Connecting Value
The first inception of the Pharma Sim product was only focused on the sales-rep simulation scenarios with a notion that a follow up consultation would be required. When we began to consider how this tool would be marketed, we very quickly understood that the end user audience we were focused on was very different from the segment of them that would be actually buying and administrating this product. Little focus was given to the Coaches and Managers who would ultimately have the most to gain from it.

By clearly identifying 3 unique end-users for the program, we were able to think about how value was being fed upstream and develop tools and processes to facilitate each user - Sales Reps would receive digital feedback and self-study materials, while their performance data would be aggregated for their managers. Managers would receive guidance and data on how to approach performance issues. Buyers and Administrators would receive performance measurements across all of their enrollees, material efficacy studies that support their decision to purchase the programs, and post-program analysis to help provide a follow up strategy once the program has completed.
Buyers / Administrators
Mid-to-high level managers who purchase the program with the intention of improving sales rep performance - wants to see outcomes, but isn’t there for the ride.

Tools to Realize Value‍
Coaches / Managers
The real target for the program - monitor and learn in realtime from the performance of their sales reps. Are provided systemic and individual performance analytic insights and guidance for impactful coaching.

Tools to Realize Value
Sales Reps
The simulation end users - sales reps in a pharma organization. Will need immediate feedback for self-diagnosis and learning materials for self study and improvement.

Tools to Realize Value
Validating our Assumptions through Extremely Low-Fidelity Prototyping
We knew we had a lot of actionable information about the kinds of interactions that learners should go through to best collect data that represents their work - but what we were definitely short on is verification around what managers would ultimately find useful in the way of tools and visibility.

To gather qualitative data around what managers and coaches would want, we developed a series of marketing one-sheets that our sales people used to discuss with our customers - acting as affordable surrogates for our as-of-yet developed program.
Onboarding: Minimizing thrash and and framing up the value.
We saw onboarding as a way to achieve two important things: 1 ) The obvious one - To improve the success of our participants in completing registration and providing them some orientation of the program, and 2) By helping our participants understand when and where to look to discover the value of the program throughout its lifecycle.

To do this, we coupled a very rational 4 part sign up process with an approachable intro video that helped explain how to onboard and walk through each of the tools and materials that would give them insight along the way.
Video Introduction
Set expectations around the process and give a quick tour of the most valuable points of insight a participant can find.
Enrollment
Verify requested enrollees and provide tools for editing participant lists.
Timelines
Verify the start end end times of the program and frame up the importance of a short timeline.
Outreach
Frame up the importance of participation from each of the 3 user levels as it directly effects the success of the program.
The Curious Case of Too Much Help
To facilitate outreach in organizations with typically strict email filtration, we needed to rely on managers sending out emails from within their orgs to help prepare their enrollees. We provided a list of enrollee emails and a templated email message that expressed the important details as well as “Copy to Clipboard” buttons to simplify the process.

During user testing, we found that users were misunderstanding the function of the copy buttons and assumed that the process was entirely automated - thus they were entirely skipping a keystone portion of the process.

We found that by removing the copy buttons and simplifiying the recipient list to names only, users were more likely to pay attention to the subtleties of the task, and the task completion rate became far more favorable.
Some closing thoughts
In a world were huge consultancies like McKesson charge a fortune and give little more than high speak in return, there is a huge opportunity for small and nimble companies to come in and build products that treat workers humanely, that challenge them in meaningful ways, that give those organizations all the tools and insight they need to solve their own unique problems.
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