Sanacorp, one of Germany’s largest pharmacy cooperatives, set out to support local pharmacies in the digital age. With the mea® brand, the company aims to create stronger connections between customers and their nearby pharmacies — improving communication and building long-term loyalty.
The mea® project strengthened local pharmacies in a highly competitive digital market by giving customers faster access to advice, products, and trusted care. As Lead UX, I directed the research, design system, and product experience, aligning cross-functional stakeholders around a unified vision. The result: a seamless ecosystem that scaled nationwide and achieved consistently high user satisfaction — reflected in over 1,000 app store reviews with a rating above four stars.
Local pharmacies in Germany are under growing pressure from online competitors and are continuously losing customers.
A UX strategy is a focused plan that raises the organization’s user experience maturity over time. At this stage, mea® already had three digital MVPs on the market, each developed independently. To ensure consistent growth and a shared direction, I led the creation of a UX strategy that aligned all teams around a unified vision, clear product goals, and a roadmap for achieving them.
Legal Boundaries; Because pharmacy products are highly regulated in Germany, we worked closely with the in-house legal team. Strict rules around online sales defined the framework for our conceptual and technical decisions — influencing everything from product flows to service design. These constraints weren’t obstacles, but guardrails that helped us design compliant, trustworthy user experiences.
In the early phase of the project, I analyzed and mapped the mea® digital ecosystem to give the team a clear understanding of all existing services and their relationships. This visual framework created shared clarity and alignment across teams. At the time, development resources were scattered throughout the organization, but as the project matured, they were brought together into a dedicated digital unit — enabling more consistent product development.
Our first MVP focused on improving the communication between pharmacies and their customers. Through the pharmacy’s website, customers can use a dedicated chat to contact the pharmacy directly, ask questions, and pre-order medications — including prescription drugs. This created a fast and accessible way for customers to reach their local pharmacist while laying the foundation for more user-centric digital services.
During the one-month MVP pilot, we tracked key KPIs such as user satisfaction and conducted usability tests and interviews with both pharmacists and customers. This gave us rapid, actionable insights to guide the next stages of product development.
Based on the insights and learnings from the MVP phase, we made a strategic decision to develop an app that seamlessly integrates the core features — chat support and the online shop — into one unified experience
