B2B ordering platform redesign and design team outsourcing
PGF – the Pharmacist Assistant
Designing the main sales and collaboration platform for the largest pharmaceutical distributor in Poland was always going to bring interesting problems, and from several directions at once. We joined forces with a large team of specialists inside the company to develop the product in line with what the business expected and what the infrastructure allowed — but before any of that could start, there had to be a technical audit and UX research.
Stage 1
UI/UX audit
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UI/UX audit
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Design documentation
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Wireframes and prototyping
Analysing the business, the users and the room to grow
The project for Polska Grupa Farmaceutyczna began with a detailed UI/UX audit of the existing ordering portal used by pharmacies. The platform serves thousands of users across the pharmaceutical sector and covers a long list of functions: placing orders, handling complaints, settlements and invoices, promotions, loyalty programmes, access to a knowledge base, purchase analytics and communication with head office. The audit took in the interface itself, usability heuristics, Hotjar session recordings, analytics data and feedback from real users, pharmacists among them. It produced a substantial report with specific recommendations — from visual matters through functional defects to consistency and navigation structure. We also identified room for new features, such as an intelligent ordering assistant and better use of the loyalty systems.
Building documentation and keeping teams in contact
As the collaboration with the client’s team got under way, we ran consultations across many departments while defining the scope — product managers, sales and marketing, operations and technical teams. The aim was to get a complete picture of what the company needed and turn it into concrete improvements. We mapped the needs of end users alongside PGF’s internal processes, which became the foundation for every later design stage.
Ordering those needs and agreeing a plan on both sides kept the work effective despite the number of people involved, and regular contact turned into something more than an exchange of e-mails between client and supplier. The relationships built, the daily stand-ups and the wider conferences keep information flowing and delivery moving.
Stage 2
Design
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Screens and templates: all inclusive
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Design system with components
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UX research
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Extended marketing package
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Implementation-ready files
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Advisory pack and roadmap
The design system, and solving problems with it
One of the central pieces of this stage was a new, comprehensive design system. We built a consistent UI component library, defining colour styles, typography, sizes, spacing and interaction states, plus the HTML structure for a flexible grid system that allows a dashboard to be personalised for current promotions, account type or an individual user. As a result every element of the interface — product cards, filters, tables, order forms — was designed against the same set of rules.
Tables, which are where users actually spend their day, were standardised — which made the whole system more intuitive despite the sheer number of functions and views. A new filtering system and collapsible sidebars make both the compact and the expanded view comfortable to work in.
Foundations for further development
The main goal was to modernise the interface in line with current UI/UX practice and the needs of business users in the pharmaceutical sector. The project also reorganised the key screens — orders, complaints, payments, promotions — and created entirely new sections for functions that had not existed before. Although WCAG accessibility was not the primary priority here, we took care over legibility, adequate contrast and scalable elements, with older users particularly in mind, for whom comfort of use matters most.
In parallel we designed new modules and a virtual assistant that uses dynamic notifications to surface the most important information and the actions available to the user. The result reads as modern, well finished and rather more marketing-minded, in keeping with the long-term strategy.
Stage 3
Implementation
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Outsourcing
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SCRUM + Jira + BitBucket
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Web performance optimisation
Building the portal
Once the design stage was complete we moved into close collaboration with the IT department, implementing the new modules and interfaces inside the existing system together. Our job was not only to hand over finished designs but to take an active part in the implementation, with a full understanding of the application structure, the existing APIs and the front-end architecture. The project was demanding because of the size of the platform and the need to stay fully compatible with everything already running.
The rollout ran in stages under Scrum, overseen by the client’s own scrum masters. Early on we built a new application skeleton around an optimised SCSS styling system — organised into modules, with design system variables and a logical component split. That structure sped up the rest of the implementation considerably and improved the performance of the whole application.
Web performance and Core Web Vitals, and what came next
We also introduced a series of front-end optimisations targeting Core Web Vitals — LCP, INP, CLS and TTFB — by reducing the number of requests, moving to WebP and SVG, unifying the typography and loading fonts dynamically. That brought interface load times down and reduced the load on the server.
Despite a deadline that was short for this much work, the rollout succeeded and produced measurable effects in users’ daily work. The Pharmacist Assistant project became the basis for further collaboration on subsequent UX audits, new features, and companion projects and digital products developed inside the PGF group.
In summary
The project for Polska Grupa Farmaceutyczna is an example of a large B2B system in the pharmaceutical sector being successfully redesigned — from a detailed UX audit, through an interface redesign and new functionality, to an effective rollout and continued development. We gave the platform a modern look, improved the ergonomics of pharmacists’ daily work and laid solid foundations for further growth, both technical and commercial.
Close collaboration with IT teams, product owners and managers across departments produced a solution that genuinely supports users in their daily work while being attractive, well optimised and ready to grow. It is one of those projects that shows how much a well-run UX/UI process can affect the functionality, performance and reception of a large corporate platform.