CHALLENGE
A decade after launching, AbbVie’s business and brand has evolved but its corporate website did not reflect the impact the company was making across the industry.

OPPORTUNITY
Bring their evolved brand identity to life on abbvie.com with an elevated user experience, functional design system, and newly developed content management system.

SOLUTION
A website that breaks down the content into clear and easy to navigate pathways and allows the user to dive deeper into a wealth of knowledge that AbbVie has created.

1. Use layered storytelling to guide the user through the site weaving in related content that is potentially of interest.
   
   
2. Build paths for progressive investigation, from bite sized to long form, expose users to an increasing depth on the topic.
   
   
3. Create actionable intelligence through widgets and tools that empower users to further act on needs related to content.
   

AbbVie’s organization is large and diverse with each business vertical having unique communication teams and needs. To create a unified and consistent experience for our audience we came up with the Dashboard concept.

These dashboards are flexible containers that could be used by each business team with their own components to house unique content. The dashboard component was modular and would adjust to fit whatever the content need was.

The result was a massively increased authorship and approval pipeline helping speed up internal business processes but it also gave uses “abstracts” to content helping with wayfinding on such a large site.

During discovery, we found that users often don’t know where to find the content they are looking for. While rearchitecting the website would help with this we knew that we needed to use the navigation to be more than just a link list.

The result was creating an “abstract” for each section of the site that could be authored by the business team to highlight the most relevant content. This had the effect of featuring content important to the business team and providing clear direction for the user.

AbbVie’s brand team had recently developed a refreshed brand identity with an outside agency. The result were design guidelines optimized for marketing and lacking guidance for owned, spaces. As a result, we developed a working design system built from unique features of AbbVie’s brand.

We quickly latched onto the unique rounded qualities of AbbVie’s wordmark. The filleted corners esepecially on the “a” inspired a repeating rounded top left corner. 

INTERNAL PROCESS
The new content management and design systems were big hits with internal business teams. AbbVie saw rapid adoption by team leads and renewed interest in featuring  content on the website.

ADDITIONAL SCOPE
After completing most of the website AbbVie had so much internal success with the new CMS and design system that they contracted two additional projects with Elephant to complete their finacial reporting and additional design system work.

METRICS
*AbbVie does not share publicly their site metrics however it can be said that across almost all measurements the new site is more engaging and with higher return users.