Designing Docuvera: Achieving 145% ROI in Life Sciences Documentation
Transforming regulatory workflows with a robust component authoring platform.
Project Summary
Challenge
Core Problems
The life sciences industry faced inefficient documentation workflows that contributed to the $250 million (25% of the $1 billion) cost of bringing a new drug to market. These workflows were driven by poor content reuse and disparate systems for storing, editing, reviewing, and approving updates.
Manual processes, such as copying and pasting, lead to errors, redundancy, and delays, while cumbersome tools like Microsoft Word hinder collaboration across departments, complicating updates and compliance.
Medical authors must create and manage highly complex, regulated documents, such as this sample USPI document (PDF, 676 KB).
Role & Approach
Role
Founding designer at Author-it Software for Docuvera, taking the product from 0 to 1.
Duration
The application was designed, delivered, and tested in quarterly milestones: user research, branding, library UI, workflows for reviews and approvals, localization, translation, and the full MVP launch (which included all core features and workflows). An agile process was followed. The total duration spanned about three years.
Work included:
User research
Branding
Design system
UI designs
Workflows
Prototypes
Solutions
Final Deliverables
Product identity design
Design system
Library UI
Editor UI & workflow
Reviewer UI & workflow
Approval UI & workflow
Localization workflow
Submit for translation workflow
Admin experience
Impacts
Docuvera revolutionized life sciences documentation by transforming complex regulatory workflows into an intuitive, component-based authoring system. By reducing errors, inefficiencies, and drug release costs, the platform achieved 82% content reuse and delivered a 145% ROI for major life sciences companies. With its structured authoring, multi-format publishing, and compliance features, Docuvera established a new industry standard widely adopted by leading organizations such as Lilly and Boehringer Ingelheim.
Recent Update
On May 25, 2025, Docuvera was acquired by Bertelsmann Investments!Featured UIs from the Launched Product
NOTE: Another designer, Mark Wilson, has continued to evolve the Docuvera experience since I left the company, and many of those changes are seen in the images below. This includes visual design changes to commenting and the evolution of collaborative authoring.
The core experience remains unchanged since I initially designed it.
Editor UI
The Editor is the core workspace for medical authors. The author has turned on the project structure display in the UI above.
Editor UI in Split View
The split view of the Editor allows the writer to compare the current document with another source, such as a Core Data Sheet.
Collaborative Authoring
The example shows the Screens of two authors editing portions of the same document simultaneously (Steve on the left and Alice on the right).
Robust Commenting
The example above shows two users commenting on a specific component. Authors can comment on selected components or at the project level.
Library UI
The Library view enables users to easily locate documents and view their status (Draft, In Review, Approved), as well as other metadata.
Drag & Drop Approved Components Into the New Document
The author can easily drag and drop an approved component from another source, such as the Core Data Sheet, into their document.
See Docuvera in Action
Steve Owens, CEO at Docuvera, narrates this product overview of the product in action. (4:35 min )