The Swedish company Hamlet Pharma provides new therapeutic solutions using a peptide-based molecular approach for targeting and killing tumour cells with greater precision. With HAMLET and its synthetic drug candidate Alpha1H, the company has an effective cancer drug pipeline with a high degree of selectivity against a variety of cancers. Recent successful outcomes include initial Phase I/II clinical trial data, proving that Alpha1H acts with high efficacy without any detectable toxicity.
HAMLET’s aim is to prove the efficacy of HAMLET therapy and to develop drugs that kill tumour cells with greater precision than current drugs.
Project’s goals
The Hamlet Pharma team reached out to me with the idea of making some specific changes to their live website to improve the UX overall. There were particular elements on the website that were not performing as expected and were causing frustration among users and a high volume of bounce rates.
The specific goals and areas to focused on for the improvements were:
- Home page – hero section
- News section – filters
- Search functionality
Hotjar
After the first meeting/briefing with the Hamlet Pharma team, I set up the tool Hotjar on their WordPress website to be able to track the user’s behaviors across the website in a short period, allowing me to make design decisions based on accurate data and user’s interactions with the website. The elements that I considered in this user research phase provided by Hotjar were the heatmaps and the video recordings of the UI interactions.
Homepage – Hero section
We identified that most of the users leaving the home page generated a high bounce rate of around 85%. In addition, at the top of the home page, the hero section didn’t encourage users to take any action or navigate the home page by scrolling through all the content. On the other hand, the information was not very well organized.
The Hamlet Pharma team had a close idea of the updates they wanted to do in this section. Even though there are too many calls to action and elements on the final version, it was critical businesses need to highlight all this information because they have potential investors visiting the website often. Therefore, the introductory material about the company has to be presented there. At least at this stage.
News or Blog page – Filter functionality & UX
The news section has grown over time with several pages of content these days. Therefore, it was difficult for users to find specific content and spend more time reading information during each web session. In addition, the website also publishes news in Swedish and English, grouped in the same news section. Therefore, it was also required to include a language filter to make a much easier experience for users when finding specific content.
Other filters incorporated into this section were the filter by year and the standard default and date filter. After a few weeks, the heatmaps and videos in Hotjar showed that the users interacted right away with the filters, having a real and a substantial impact on the time spent in each session on the website.
Search functionality – UX
The search functionality with the WordPress template was not working as expected. As a result, it was necessary to include a completely new functionality through a WordPress plugin, adjusting some coding to incorporate it with the website’s look & feel. Also, the search bar layout was changed, so now users can type in keywords and find specific content with one click.
The results are shown in an efficient grid that can fit many results on one screen, making the content on this new search functionality easy to digest and click through.
Before making the website’s UI changes, the bounce rate was close to 85-90%. After a few months, with all the changes I did in place, this number decreased dramatically, as well as the page views in each user session. A very positive outcome in a brief period.
Other elements considered to be made with the UI changes were more technical and aligned with good SEO practices like image compression, some layout changes to make essential things easy to find, and structure of headings across some of the most critical sections of the website.
