Pre-approved PSE products at your fingertips

When regulations changed in 2005, medicines containing PSE, including allergy decongestant medicines, moved behind the pharmacy counter.

In fact, with the new regulations in 2005, allergy decongestant medicine category sales dropped 50% nation-wide ever since.

The allergy brand approached us to streamline and improve consumer purchasing experience by leveraging available technology.

For the purpose of storytelling, some data has been modified or omitted. The view of project does not reflect the views of the client.

iOS App | E-Commerce

Role: User Research, Interaction Design

Team: 2 designers, 1 brand manager, 1 innovation manager, 1 IT consultant

Year: 2017

The Process

Reconstructing the Journey of PSE Purchase

To better understand and frame the problem we were attacking, our team engaged with extensive interviews with our client and stakeholders, as well as in-person local retail visits. We reconstructed the observations into user journeys of consumers, pharmacists, along with operations, intended to surface unknowns and opportunities to dig deeper into.

Consumer Journey Insights through Digital Diaries

To gain further insights into the consumer journey, our team set up a digital ethnography (diaries) and recruited 15 participants of current PSE users, past PSE users, and other allergy medicine users.

We learned about confusion, inconvenience and feeling of guilt and embarrassment associated to PSE purchasing experience, that allowed us to develop our point of view for the project and update the consumer journey with pain points and opportunity areas.

We immersed ourselves through photo documentation, written answers, and video entries that provided emotional context in the journey moments.

What a better experience could look like

We created a series of experience storyboards to convey what a better experience of purchasing PSE could look like. Along with our client and stakeholders, we identified areas of focus to guide our efforts to near-term actions that was relevant for the future brand vision. We discussed and expanded on the selected digital concept.

The stories highlighted key moments for improvement along the journey such as adding transparency at home, making the product easily accessible, or streamlining the experience at the checkout for both consumers and pharmacists.

Translating retail purchasing
experience to mobile

Our goal was to translate the retail purchase experience in online shopping format and simplify the complexity of purchasing PSE in an easily understood and consumable manner. We ran an audit of few current retailer platforms, to where we created guidelines and assumption to build the preliminary app.

The app instilled confidence on the vision of what was possible to unlock and surfaced key technical challenges that we needed to address regarding operations, retailer's technology readiness, and regulation for the concept to be successful.

Our activities included structuring information architecture based on use cases and personas, page types, wireframes.

Preparing high-fidelity mockups
to jumpstart user testing

In order to engage in user feedback, we needed to up the concept fidelity. We created the high-fidelity mockup and prototype by using one of our retailer’s design visual language, as a starting point.

The preliminary, semi-functional app prototype and a 50 seconds video was a quick way to introduce the proposed concept for user testing, removing the ambiguity of the design. We were expecting iterative rounds of changes through quantitative and qualitative user testing, and we needed to take the fastest route.

We engaged our client IT department and legal team, in order to consult and collaborate with a 3PO infrastructure of prescription drug monitoring tools and technology, that supported the development of the digital consumer experience.

Usability Testing + Customer Research

To validate the concept, our team set up 5 moderated consumer sessions, interviewed 12 pharmacists and technicians, and engaged with retailers. We discussed about the concept, how our technology could fit into their near-future system, and the roadmap for integration. The new insights helped us review and update our concepts and plans for further development and validation.

Activities included 5 moderated consumer sessions where we recruited D product users and non-users that ran through the app prototype and video live; we interviewed 2 pharmacists to understand how the new system could integrate into their workflow; and we engaged with a few retail customers, where we interviewed 10 current employees (pharmacists/technicians).