Woman working on multiple screens looking at Novartis design system

Enabling business transformation for a global pharma leader

Novartis, a global pharmaceutical company based in Switzerland, has invested heavily in digital transformation in recent years. As Novartis streamlined its tech infrastructure, the next big leap for the firm was to improve operational efficiency by bringing many processes in-house. Novartis turned to Modus to build an enterprise design system that empowers UX and development teams to quickly scale omnichannel, customer-centric experiences that are both comprehensive and compliant.

Enterprise Design System
Design Ops Consulting
Workflow Analysis & Optimization
UX & UI Designs
Design Style Guides & Governance
MLR Submission Support
ADA Compliance

Novartis design system screens on iPhone, iPad, Laptop, and Desktop

The Ask: Design-to-development process improvement

With a global portfolio of more than 100-plus marketed therapeutic drugs with marketing websites managed by an array of vendors, Novartis suffered from brand sprawl, redundancies, and technical debt.

Modus partnered with Novartis’ global UX team to rapidly prove success with an enterprise system that would integrate with their in-house Drupal content management system. Novartis didn’t want to remove its need for third-party brand and marketing agencies entirely, but rather, it needed a way to bring in-house the back-end process to support quick deployment of brand-adherent web components.

Our Solution: One design system to rule them all

Modus met Novartis’ goal to streamline patient- and provider-facing marketing website creation and management by building a set of templates that can be customized by brand visuals and messages. Our experience design team embedded with Novartis to lead accessibility reviews, interaction and interface designs, requirements building, sprint planning, and executive team presentations.

Modus delivered an enterprise design toolkit so that any agency working with Novartis can use the components and rapidly prototype new feature sets. We also provided process consulting such as internal and external team training, Sketch to Figma transition and tutorials, and governance documentation.

Multiple screens of Novartis Design System working

The Result: Massive time and cost savings

The Novartis enterprise design system is being applied to 100-plus brands as part of the company’s ongoing transformation. Rather than spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of design and development time per website, Novartis is now able to roll out websites within weeks.