A learning platform for medical aesthetics, rebuilt around how people actually learn

A dumping ground, not a platform

The Allergan Medical Institute is the training program of Allergan Aesthetics, the maker of BOTOX®, serving medical aesthetics professionals and people considering a career in the field. It runs real-world events and a digital platform that together form the single biggest source of education in the category.

The digital platform was not keeping up. Content had accumulated for years without a governing structure, organized around regulatory compliance rather than how practitioners actually engaged with it. Branded and non-branded content lived on separate sites. The mobile experience was an afterthought. Users consistently reported that they could not find what they were looking for, and the business felt it.

Allergan had a clear ambition: personalized learning journeys, delivered inside an experience that felt closer to MasterClass or Netflix than to a legacy LMS. They were not sure where to start.

Mapping pitfalls and opportunities

The engagement began with a full audit of the existing experience across desktop and mobile, across authenticated and non-authenticated states, and across the separate branded and non-branded properties. I identified the core use cases the platform needed to support, which practitioners and aspiring professionals it needed to serve, and where the existing experience was working against its own goals.

The onboarding flow surfaced immediately as one of the biggest points of friction. It asked too much, too early, and in the wrong order. Drop-off was significant and predictable. The catalog itself was the other obvious problem: organized by the logic of legal review, not by the logic of a practitioner looking for a specific technique or a newcomer trying to orient themselves.

Audit board: listening to stakeholders, the data, and the content itself

Modern UX inside a regulated category

The hard part was not designing a good learning experience. The hard part was designing one that could survive Medical Legal Review, meet ISI requirements, and still feel as fluid as the consumer platforms users spend the rest of their day inside.

A prioritized structure for a phased build

The sitemap proposed a clear division between authenticated and unauthenticated experiences, with shared pages acting as the connective tissue. I prioritized each node against business goals and development realities so the team could ship value early and layer in complexity over subsequent releases.

Proposed sitemap with prioritization and authentication states

Less, and in a better order

Onboarding was the first thing we built, and most of the work went into hiding complexity from the user. The recommendation was to streamline the login flow, move disqualifying questions to the front so that ineligible users were not asked to invest before being turned away, and reduce the total number of questions to the minimum viable set. Anything that could be inferred from other signals was inferred. Anything that could be asked later was asked later.

This applied equally to the interested track for people considering a career in medical aesthetics. They needed a credible way in that did not require clinical credentials to see the right content, and did not subject them to a form designed for licensed practitioners.

The same flow had to handle proctored training as a fast path. For users who needed to complete proctored training in order to place product orders, the priority was getting them into their required content quickly and picking up the rest of the profile later. The logic had to tell each of these users apart, route them correctly, and place each one into the right content journey based on their role, credentials, and experience.

Unified login flow and journey placement logic across account types and user goals

Four focus areas, one catalog

I proposed organizing the catalog around four focus areas that mirror how practitioners actually specialize: facial injectables, skincare, body contouring, and plastic and regenerative medicine. The full portfolio of brands and treatment areas was mapped to these focus areas, with contextual filters that kept the browsing experience manageable rather than exhaustive.

The biggest architectural move was merging the branded and non-branded content into a single catalog. Rather than splitting the experience by regulatory category, each course card carries a small product badge when it references a specific brand. One grid, one search, one mental model, with the regulatory requirement met by a visual signal rather than a structural wall.

Treating focus areas as categories allows us to display contextual filters below, improving the user experience while meeting MLR requirements

Defining the words that define the site

Alongside the taxonomy I developed a controlled vocabulary for the platform, defining concepts and the relationships between them: learning journeys, courses, lessons, modules, and resources. A shared vocabulary across product, editorial, and the interface meant every team downstream could work from the same model. Breaking content down to the lesson level had a second benefit: it opened up new opportunities for lessons to be authored, reused, and recombined.

A predictable content framework presents every course systematically, building trust while elevating the brand

On working with the right people