The Medical Affairs Company Overview
*Due to my non-disclosure agreement, I won't be able to share the specifics of my project.
However, I can talk about the process and the methodology I learned at The Medical Affairs Company.
Stuff You Need to Know
The Medical Affairs Company (TMAC) is a staffing company located in Kennesaw, Georgia for medical science liaisons (MSL) and other medical-related jobs. They also provide necessary training for MSLs starting out their careers. They reached out to Betta Innovations (startup I work for) to help for user research for their mobile application. TMAC was working with a local mobile development company but realized that they didn't quite know how to better serve their MSL users. Before we began our research, we met with the stakeholders from TMAC and aligned on the goals for this research.
They wanted to learn:
- How can they keep the MSLs engaged within their app
- What kind of content would be relevant for the users
- The viability of an app like this in the market
Research Planning
Our process was simple. We got a list of participants from TMAC and used Calendly to schedule them for a remote interview session over 2 days. Remote sessions were the most convenient for the users because they were constantly traveling for work. We generated a list of questions we wanted to ask the users that would satisfy the goals mentioned above. These questions ranged from demographic information and the familiarity of other competitor apps to how they kept up with current industry news.
The Interview Process
I facilitated all of the interviews and had 1 - 2 note takers. All of the interviews, except 1, were conducted through a Zoom call (screenshots below). First, I asked permission to record the conversation strictly for documentation purposes, which allowed me to recall certain parts during synthesis. Then, I read an overview of TMAC and asked the questions from the interview scripts to each participant. The note takers followed along with their own copies of the questions and wrote down the corresponding answers. In total, we interviewed 13 users over the course of 2 consecutive days.
Findings & Report Out
After completing the interviews, my team and I transferred the notes into stickies and began to synthesize our interview findings. Then, I gathered all of the patterns and trends from our questions into a report, listing out the questions we used in our interviews and the answers that had the most reoccurrence amongst the participants. We prioritized the questions based on their impact and relevance to the goals discussed earlier with the stakeholders.
Where Things Are Now
The report, along with the interview recordings, were sent to TMAC for analysis. A copy of that report was also sent to their development team. We are awaiting further correspondence with the development team and TMAC for next steps.
Thanks for reading.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out!