Redesigning the digital touchpoints for Roche's diagnostics division — creating a unified experience platform that connects lab professionals, clinicians, and patients across the care continuum.
01 — CHALLENGE
Roche's diagnostics division operated across a fragmented digital landscape — with separate product portals, support systems, and information hubs that had grown organically across business units without a unifying design language or shared user experience. Lab professionals needed to interact with multiple disconnected systems to manage instrument performance, access test protocols, troubleshoot issues, and order supplies. The digital estate reflected Roche's organizational structure rather than how professionals actually worked.
The strategic ambition was to move from a portfolio of disconnected tools to a connected diagnostics experience platform — one where context followed the user rather than forcing them to re-establish it in each system. The UX challenge was immense: serve highly expert users across wildly different professional contexts without oversimplifying the complexity that makes the tools professionally useful.
"I use four different Roche portals every day and they all feel like they were built by different companies. None of them know who I am."— Lab Director, Research Interview
02 — RESEARCH
Designing for lab professionals requires understanding a domain with deep expertise, strict regulatory requirements, and zero tolerance for errors that could affect patient outcomes. We ran research across three primary user segments — lab directors, clinical laboratory scientists, and procurement managers — in hospital labs, independent diagnostic centers, and research facilities. Each context had meaningfully different needs, constraints, and mental models around the same Roche tools.
3 lab environments
Embedded in hospital and independent diagnostic labs to understand professional workflows, instrument ecosystems, and the specific moments where digital tools were needed and used.
42 professionals
Co-design workshops with each user segment to map current journeys, surface unmet needs, and evaluate early concept directions before moving into prototype design.
11 existing portals
Audited all existing Roche digital touchpoints to map the current state experience and identify consolidation opportunities, capability gaps, and design inconsistencies.
03 — PROCESS
The design approach centered on defining a unified experience architecture — a shared navigation model, interaction language, and design system that could serve as the foundation for all Roche digital products regardless of their underlying technical implementation. We ran parallel tracks: one defining the platform-level UX patterns, the other applying those patterns to the highest-priority product surface for the pilot launch. This dual-track approach ensured the platform thinking was grounded in real product challenges rather than theoretical abstraction.
04 — SOLUTION
The Roche Digital Experience platform introduced a unified navigation shell, shared identity system, and persistent context layer that allowed users to move between product modules without re-establishing who they were and what instrument environment they managed. The platform concept centered on a role-aware home experience that surfaced each user's relevant instruments, active tasks, and support needs at a glance — regardless of which underlying system those tasks lived in.
The pilot launch focused on the instrument management surface, replacing three disconnected portals with a single unified view of instrument performance, maintenance schedules, and consumable inventory. This became the proof-of-concept for the platform approach and the foundation for phased migration of Roche's broader digital portfolio.
A personalized command center that surfaces each professional's relevant instruments, pending tasks, and alerts — adapting to role, facility type, and instrument portfolio automatically.
A single consolidated view replacing three separate portals, giving lab directors real-time visibility into all instruments, maintenance status, and consumable levels in one place.
In-context troubleshooting, documentation, and case management surfaced at the instrument level — so help is always one step from the problem it addresses, not three portals away.
05 — RESULTS
The pilot platform launch was deployed to 500 lab sites across three markets. User satisfaction scores improved significantly compared to the fragmented prior state, and support ticket volume dropped as contextual self-service tools made troubleshooting more accessible. The platform framework is now being extended to Roche's full digital portfolio as the program scales globally.
06 — LEARNINGS
Creating a unified experience across multiple business units required navigating competing product ownership, legacy technical constraints, and stakeholder buy-in across organizational boundaries. The design work was easier than the alignment work. Both are essential.
Lab professionals have deep domain expertise and strong opinions about their tools. Designing for experts means trusting their intelligence, preserving the power and complexity they rely on, and focusing simplification on navigation and workflow — not on removing capability.
The decision to pilot the platform on a single product surface before committing to the full architecture was the right call. It gave us real user feedback, stakeholder confidence, and a refined design system before we had to apply it at scale. Prove it small, then grow it.