GSK Acneco - A Personalised Skin Care App
During 2019, our cross functional team partnered with another innovation team at GSK, who were focusing on personalised skin care, diagnosis of and on demand care. The below is a brief walkthrough of that partnership journey…
Framing the Problem.
Problem Statement: As many as 80% of people suffer with acne in the UK, however fewer than 15% of us ever visit a HCP. Instead, we over rely on the skincare market spending upwards of £30 per month on a strict, self-directed morning and evening routine. For those of us who do seek medical support, we often leave feeling “dismissed” with little direction as to how to manage our acne treatment. As a result, we fall into a trial and error approach that can take years of disconnected diagnoses, where we feel we lack the attentive and on-demand support we’re looking for.
Constraints
1) GSK had a very slow approval process for certain things, which meant we couldnt rapidly test and learn out in the market.
2) User testing with the public also came with a lot approval hoops to jump through.
3) Teams we needed to partner with didn’t understand the product, design & engineering process, so required taking them on the journey with us which naturally slowed the process down.
Who
Teens and young adults aged 14 - 25. Male and female. Specific to the UK for now (group size of 3m+). High likelihood (~80%) of experiencing mild - moderate acne symptoms at a time when image based social pressures are high. Feelings of hopelesness and inadequacy are reported, resulting in anxiety and a reduced desire to take part in social situations. As a result, this persona is highly motivated to 'try anything', resulting in a group with high purchasing intent towards the beauty / skincare market, at an average spend of £400 p/year. This persona favours family and friend suppoort, along with relying on self-directed learning over seeing a GP (<20% report doing so), which makes them impressionable and susceptible to inaccurate or misleading information. This persona are early adopters, and more likely to try (86%) and trust (66%) digital tools in this area.
Success Metrics
The overall user outcome for us is better skin and less flare ups, therefore happier customers. Being a rosacea sufferer, I can empathise.
From a business perspective; Providing remote acne care to 90k patients each month could result in £11.5m in annual recurring revenue.
Upon launch: cost per acquisition, click through rate, conversion, and cost per thousand impressions.
Discovery Part 1 - Surveys
With my product manager and business analyst, we went out to the public via pollfish surveys.
This enabled us to form a more accurate picture of our persona, the journey they go through for acne treatment and where the opportunities lay for us in terms of product and business outcomes.
A few of our top findings were that out of 100 respondents;
1. A significant segment of them would be happy to talk to a doctor or specialist to receive acne advice/treatment, they would in addition supplement this advice with Google searches.
2. Almost 85 of the respondents spend over £10 on skin care, where 40 would spend over £50 and even £100.
3. 85 would use a digital acne self diagnosis tool and 71 would be happy to send photos/videos to a doctor online.
4. Almost 70 would pay for this service (in varying amounts starting form £10) and 22 would use the service but not pay. So perhaps still an opportunity there.
“Our hypothesis: A £15/month subscription service that connects acne sufferers with a HCP remotely via a web app. The service includes adaptive diagnosis and prescribing decisions with on-demand 1:1 chat support.”
Discovery - Part 2 - Alpha Test
Due to a lack of UR time on my team, we utilised an external company, Liberating Research to assist us with the Alpha testing. We conducted 1hr F2F interviews with 11 acne patients to uncover pain points with the current care on offer and to learn whether the service we’ve prototyped meets those needs. We learned:-
• Patients rely heavily on consumer skincare. They spend £30/month on a strict, self-directed morning and evening routine.
• They feel as though they don’t receive the level of attention they’re looking for from the GP. They feel “dismissed”.
• Our service gives them the attentive, specialist care they desire through a medium they’re more comfortable with.
• All interviewees showed a high propensity to pay as our service was seen as providing excellent value.
Alignment & Ideation Workshop
Having conducted enough due diligence and hopped through enough of the GSK hurdles, we had some buy in from our business partners to engage further with our hypothesis and build out an MVP with our engineering team. There was still much perceived risk and concern, so we had to be wary of this constraints or what we called “experiment killers” (as seen in the first image).
We rallied the cross functional team, level set, aligned and chopped through our workshop goals. We focused ourselves around what we called our product pillars; ‘access to care’, ‘getting the right product’ and ‘support’. These in some way formed our sub hypotheses of each stage or part of the product experience.
We also needed to build out a systems map, as we didn’t only have the patient to consider as part of this experience, we had the dermatologist or specialist experience needing to be built out as well.
Mapping out key flows
As mentioned in the above section, during our workshop, we discussed the obvious need for not only designing for the patient experience, but the HCP (health care professional) experience and in addition, the back office to look after prescription logistics, complaints, customer support, pay etc.
For the patient experience, this also wasn’t a one time thing, we had to consider for multiple returns for different reasons. The idea was to initially allow for uploading of photos/videos that would be then sent to their selected skin specialist (or HCP), who would then take up to 24-48 hours to review and diagnose the type of acne and what was required to care for and support, so we needed to build for some type of call back (ideally email or app notification) to prompt a return.
In terms of support, this was a key value driver as well, we wanted to provide an on-going support system to ensure all was going to plan, if not, how to shift approach to provide better acne care.
Proto -Testing & UI Design
We ran a couple user testing sessions to test out our new flows, both in app and desktop form. Not only that, we wanted to test our value proposition statements and branding. We had specific personas we were starting out with and wanted to ensure we hit the audience in the right way.
To Conclude.
Working closely with our engineering team, we launched our MVP to a very small subset of users that we had originally conducted user testing with. Though this is as far as it went due to problems with our business stakeholders, medical and legal at GSK, there was too much associated risk and it would take far too long for approval. Despite the overwhelmingly positive feedback, both from the business and our users to date.
A couple key learnings: We really required having more breadth to our cross functional team in the form of a medical expert in the team and perhaps even legal. These were the areas we kept tripping up on due to the GSK perceived risk. We should have also received approval from the EU governance board ahead of our first big workshop that resulted in the beta prototype.