Merck DORA

Merck DORA — the "Diabetes Online Risk Assessment" tool by Merck Group — aimed to provide a web-based application to help raise awareness of diabetes risk, symptoms, treatment, and prevention in African countries. The core challenges included:

• The need to rebuild an existing application into a lightweight, performant web experience suited for low-bandwidth mobile contexts across Africa.
• Ensuring the app could run well on older mobile devices and browsers, including heavy usage of compressed-data browsers like Opera Mini (used by ~60% of visitors).
• Providing multilingual support, including languages such as Swahili and Amharic, to serve a broad African user base.
• Designing the user interface to meet brand guidelines while also being highly efficient (< 1 MB app size) and usable in constrained network conditions

To address these demands, the team delivered a tailored, high-performance web application alongside careful UX research:

• Rebuilt using Ruby on Rails for the backend and Vue.js for the frontend, optimized so the final application weighed only ~0.7 MB.
• Conducted extensive user research in target regions: confirmed that over 90% of users accessed via mobile, with a broad spectrum of screen resolutions (from 360×640 up to 720×1280). This insight informed design decisions to support very old devices.
• Developed a separate version of the application optimized for Opera Mini, to ensure broad accessibility in contexts where data and JavaScript were heavily constrained.
• Delivered multilingual versioning, enabling rollout from one country (Kenya) to eight others across Africa—expanding reach and local-language support.

• The app was successfully launched and scaled from Kenya to nine African countries, expanding language support and growing partner networks in pharmacies and health education channels.
• The slim-weight architecture (~0.7 MB bundle) significantly helped usability under constrained connectivity and data-cost environments.
• The redesign and rollout contributed to Merck's broader med-tech ecosystem, leading to further collaboration across additional projects in Africa—including new risk-assessment tools and professional-education platforms.
• For the target users (individuals at risk of diabetes) the platform enabled broader access to information, increased awareness of symptoms, and easier path to prevention guidance—even on older or low-data devices.