Responsive IVAs?
For most Veeva presentations, it's not important to design our slides to be mobile-responsive. If the client doesn't have a specific requirement that their IVAs need to be responsive, then the agency should make the recommendation that we not create a responsive IVA. Veeva presentations can be designed and programmed to be responsive, for viewing on phones, but most brands choose to just forego all the extra effort and save their money, for a few reasons:
1. Veeva CLM (in-person) is typically not viewed on a sales rep's phone — honestly I'd say it probably never is. That just wouldn't be a good experience for the rep or the HCP.
2. For Veeva Engage, it's unlikely the HCP will be viewing the presentation on their phone; this is also simply not a great experience. I'd argue that if the rep can't catch the HCP at a time when they can be at their laptop/desktop computer, it's probably not worth presenting to them in Veeva Engage. A regular phone call may be more effective.
If we wanted to make an IVA responsive, of course that would require something like double the layout work, and then a lot more time for edit, dev, QA, and routing through the team for comments. This would end up being a lot more expensive for something that probably doesn't add any significant value for our client.
Another reason a non-responsive IVA is cheaper is that, once you remove the idea of making the layout fluid and having the content re-rag for different screen sizes, this allows us to cut a lot of corners on the dev side. The most extreme example of this is just having each slide of content be one big image, and then the developer can program invisible hotspots over top of that image wherever needed. This makes programming the presentation much, much faster(/cheaper). Of course this approach would never be appropriate for, say, a website or an email, but for an IVA it's fine. IVAs are unique in that we don't have to worry about SEO, we don't have to worry about screen readers, and we don't have to worry about phones. Let's keep it cheap for our clients, and tell them how and why we're keeping it cheap for them; they'll appreciate it!
– Manning
Questions/comments? Feel free to contact me at manning@manningkrull.com. I update these articles pretty frequently — best practices evolve over time as the world of digital quickly changes, and I always welcome insights from others.