Website review: www.myalli.com/global - GSK-sponsored site about its pharmacy-only weight loss aid, alli
Welcome to the first in eyeforpharmas series of pharma website reviews. Each month, Emma DArcy will look at a different online patient forum to explore how pharma engages with patients and how the patient-physician-pharma relationship can be improved through branded websites. First up: www.myalli.com/global, GSKs sponsored site about its pharmacy-only weight loss aid, alli
Overall rating **
The site strives to be a community with just the right number of gadget-y things to convey a sense of Web 2.0, but it is really an extended product brochure. The patient is in the center but squashed by a great big dollop of alli.
Content
This site is dense. And no, thats not a quip about the products claim to help weight loss. There is so much content, mostly delivered didactically, that it gets pretty boring within minutes. Who has time to read through an essay-on-a-page?
I did. It took me a couple of hours. I had to keep stopping to snack because all the talk and pictures of food made me peckish. Its a shame because there is much to do on this site, if you can get past the text-heavy feelquizzes, planners, recipes, videos, and calculators. Unfortunately, it feels like youre back at school and about to be tested on what youve read at the end of the lesson.
The site claims lots of personalized bits and bobs, but it seems there is just a forum that is real-time, and that is achingly quiet. There seems to be a dearth of males on the site. The other personalized bits are a weekly email about your targets, but the tools can be tricked. For example, I lied about my weight, and then when I put my actual weight-loss in I was told I was 87% of the way to my target. Not bad for spending an hour on the site, but hardly the activity that the site was urging me to take up.
Furthermore, despite haranguing me about not having meals with >15g of fat in them, some of the very recipes recommended exceeded that amount and I was told off for adding them to my planner.
Collaboration
Not a jot. There are lots of tools, lots of controlled one-way static information, but no signs of seeking patients feedback or suggestionsother than taking alli for weight loss. Even the promotions, like clothes vouchers, are perfunctory.
How about collaborating with weight loss experts, or being able to set up your own blog on the site about your alli plan? After all, one of the points the site makes is that it is better to talk about your weight loss problems.
The site also repetitively tells us that food diaries are good. Can we combine both and have an app, a game, something that makes weight loss fun rather than a chore? Perhaps a fat-zapping game using alli like space invaders would encourage more guys to join up and raise the activity level as advised?!
Community
This is a unidirectional site. There is no interaction between patients and the company and there is no interaction encouraged between patients and healthcare professionals.
Perhaps the name allicircles comes from the fact that the site is all about circling back to alli, on every page and in every way. Alli is omnipotent.
There is a faux-sense of community through listening to testimonials from people taking alli, but there is no opportunity to submit your own testimonial or to participate in debate about the product or the challenges of being overweight.
And who are these people in the testimonials? I would like to know a little more about them to believe that they are not paid actors. We are told that these are stories from people just like you not really.
A little less conversation from the site creators via such seemingly perfectly compliant and motivated patients, please, and a little more action and points of participation.
Character
This is a distinctly feminine site, which is a shame since men are part of the obesity epidemic, too. Yet the dominating images are of women. I spotted three men in various site images, but two of them were clearly helping their larger lady pals chop up vegetables and one was doing bicep curls, looking pretty ripped already with no need to take alli.
The site would be better balanced with demonstrations or testimonials attesting to the physical and medical improvements alli can help patients reach and reinforcing the importance of the medical complications of obesity.
Even where there is a science-y bit, which is actually really well written and explains quite complex science in an accessible way, a not particularly overweight lady twirls around in a blue dress with accompanying Pepe le Peu-like graphics presumably intended to convey how easy it is to take alli and feel all floaty and lovely. But given allis sharting side effectsa euphemism for the defecation-flatuence events described by some usersthis is not perhaps the best visual to use.
The site itself appears to have been sanitized of sharting, although there are ways to engage with humor about these challenges if GSK would allow a community to develop.
Commitment
There is a lot of talk about patients committing to positive changes for weight loss. There is little commitment from the site sponsors about doing more to make this site more engaging for patients.
The website review is a regular feature of eyeforpharmas Patient Compliance newsletter. If you would like to suggest a site for review, please contact editor James Geary (jgeary@eyeforpharma.com).