In November, the team received an RFP from Ascensia Diabetes Care, the makers of Contour diabetes blood management products. The brief noted that they had too many disparate (global) site experiences for customers, and a tight new product launch in some countries this coming April.

I pitched the project with some new pals (Mathias and Elisabeth) at Publicis Sapient, Paris.

We won the work and are deep in planning with Ascensia’s development partner, RightPoint, who work just across the street from us, on Water St., in Boston.

We’re getting aggressive on the timeline, but feel we can at least crush the beginnings of a new digital design system over the next few weeks, launch the new products in 8 countries, then come back around to a backlog of the work needed to make the Ascensia ecosystem clean, tight, right, and conversion-driven.

I hear there may be an app coming too, which would be cool, and with a new passport in hand (I think I liked the old one, where I was ten years younger, better), I am ready to visit Basel, Switzerland if they’ll have me.

In hindsight, we took on too much for a 6-week Define phase. The readout was good, but the team was buried in user and stakeholder interviews, competitive and comparative audits, sitemaps, flows, ecosystems, wires, flows and POVs on system and design, content and SEO too.

In the end, the work helped us create a POC that the business was proud of, and we had a working plan forward into detailed design.