Building an online surgical training and knowledge sharing network.

The brief.

DePuy Synthes, part of Johnson & Johnson, tasked Deeson with relaunching their online peer-to-peer professional education platform for surgeons.

The Drupal-powered, mobile-responsive website featured more than 1200 pieces of content, including videos and presentations created by some of the world's leading surgical experts.

The website connected DePuy Synthes with surgeons unable to attend residential courses, as well as supplementing residential and classroom training. This was particularly important, as 60% of surgeons say being unable to take time out of their practice is the main reason they are unable to attend residential courses.

The primary challenge was to differentiate the platform from competitors', by allowing the surgeon faculty to lead content development and provide high quality, impartial Continuing Medical Education (CME) accredited content that surgeons value. Another objective of the development of the site was to make it the gold standard within the industry for outstanding design and user experience.

The strategy.

The information architecture was informed by user research through direct access to real users, undertaken in-house by DePuy Synthes and supported by Deeson on location. This analysis helped us understand how users accessed content and their journey through the site. The research found that around 40% of the platform’s users use mobiles or tablets, supporting the need for a responsive design.

Users said they wanted to search and browse content before spending time registering on the site. While the site’s core audience would still be medical professionals, most of the content would now be accessible to all. The navigation was redesigned so that users would be able to search by specialism, as this was a more intuitive way for surgeons to discover content.

The platform.

We built a Drupal platform with a content personalisation engine to provide users with a personalised homepage featuring content specific to their interests. We implemented a bespoke authentication model so content could be indexed by Google to help search and SEO rankings.

The site was integrated with the Ooyala online video platform for content hosting and analytics. A bespoke CPD reporting solution was also created to enable DePuy Synthes to manage the accreditation of surgeons using their products.

The results.

The platform achieved a community of 13,000 surgeons and healthcare professionals across 120 countries with more than 100 key opinion leader content contributors from 25 countries.

The relaunched professional education and CPD platform significantly improved overall site engagement. Abandonment rate for sign-up and login pages fell significantly, the bounce rate reduced by nearly 40%, and the average visit time increasing by around 15%.