Increasing pharmacy efficiency with multimodal messaging
Project scope
Design messaging as a core feature
Include bulk & automated messaging
Messages should automatically format to recipients preferred channel
My role
2nd designer, 1st UX researcher
Owned patient side design
Collaborator on pharmacy side
Conducted discovery & testing with customer advisory board and field experts
Methods
Evaluation of heritage product
Competitive analysis
Customer advisory board(CAB)
Collaboration with field experts
User Testing with qualified experts
Engineering reviews
Pharmacy personas
Patient personas
Research
Research efforts encompassed an extensive exploration of the heritage products, which unfortunately lacked analytics, but yielded a wealth of tribal experience. Usability testing was conducted with both in-house experts and the CAB.
For the UI work we studied industry-standard enterprise UI solutions, specific interest in Intercom’s use of variables. Our design system was inspired by multi-product systems such as Atlassian and Carbon. I also studied HTML, CSS, React, and Untitled UI.
Methods
Key takeaways
The problem
Pharmacy owners struggle to make ends meet, they need a cost efficient way to communicate with their patients while also respecting their patient's communication preferences and remaining HIPAA compliant, so that they can stay competitive.
Supported channels
Solution - select screens
Testing
Given the complex and innovative nature of the purposed solution, I advocated for a baseline level of usability testing with internal users and field experts via a prototype as a starting point. My stakeholders agreed and were supportive.
I partnered with our Principle Product Manager and we began hosting what we called “Usability sessions” with the experts we had available to us and internal testers. Experts tested the specialized pharmacy tool and internal testers tested the patient app. For these sessions we used a prototype and early production builds.
Challenges
Maintaining database compatibility with heritage product, which allowed support for message histories
Providing support for numerous integrations, which supply different data, resulting in variable user flows
Launching in brown-field market required strong parity with competitors
Next steps
There are plans to further integrate the VOW IVR system into the platform. At initial launch we offer a partial integration of the automated phone tree, Lumistry's most used and profitable heritage product. Additionally I'd like to see more customization options to better accommodate specialized work flows for pharmacy business models that are more unique.