Pre-approved PSE allergy medicines at your fingertips

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

Thus, with the new 2005 laws, allergy PSE decongestant category sales dropped 50% nation-wide ever since.

Our client and #1 Allergy brand in the US approached us to find ways to improve sales by leveraging design strategy, user-centered methodologies and 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.

Role:
Design Strategy,
User Research,
Generative Research,
Interaction Design, Design Thinking & Workshops

Team:
Lisa Lehman, design lead
Veronica Lin, designer
Client team:
Brand manager,
Innovation manager,
IT consultant

Year:
2016 - 2017

The Process

First, Identifying the Problem

To better understand the problem we were attacking, our team led and built research plans informed by key interviews with stakeholders and users. From outreach, to discussion guides, interviews and synthesis, our team owned the process of generating and gathering interview data. We reconstructed the user journeys of consumers, pharmacists, along with operations, intended to surface unknowns and opportunities to dig deeper into.

Pressure testing our Hypothesis: Reconstructing the User Journey of PSE Purchase

To validate our hypothesis and gain further insights into our problem, we ran a digital ethnography (diaries). We recruited 15 participants of current PSE users, past PSE users, and other allergy medicine users, where we learned about their confusion, inconvenience and feeling of guilt and embarrassment associated to the purchasing experience.

Armed with new insights, we synthesized our learnings and updated the consumer journey map with pain points and opportunity areas. We defined our project point of view and goals.

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

What would a better experience look like?
Trends, relevant content, available technologies, patterns analysis &co.

We conducted secondary research into sourcing relevant content, available technologies, parallel industry practices, highlighted major trends and recognized patterns relevant to the purchasing experience, such as simplifying transaction through digital payment, data collection through biometrics, streamlining operations through a digital store and so on.

We visualized improved experiences through storyboards and evaluated feasibility in collaboration with our client and stakeholders, to guide our efforts to near-term actions that was relevant for the future brand vision.

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.

From concept to prototype: Demystifying PSE purchase moments through Mobile Purchase

The concept that came on top was to simplify the experience through mobile purchase, which would bypass our major pain points during the retail shopping experience.

Tasked to translating the retail purchase experience to online shopping format next, our goal was to 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.

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

To unlock technical challenges,
we created high-fidelity mockup and video for the next round of research and validation

The app instilled confidence on the vision of what was possible to unlock and surfaced key technical challenges that we needed to solve for in order to be implemented nation-wide. We had to address PSE behind the counter operations, retailer's technology readiness, and consumer data and regulatory challenges.

To engage in these discussions, we needed to up the concept fidelity that would easily paint the picture to stakeholders, removing the ambiguity of the concept. We created a preliminary, semi-functional app prototype and a 50 seconds video was a quick way to introduce the proposed concept for user testing with end users, operations, brand and retailers.

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.

Validating our concept: realigning with all involved stakeholders

From outreach, to discussion guides, interviews and synthesis, our team owned the process of leading, coordinating, generating and gathering interview data. We talked to end users, PSE behind the counters pharmacists and technicians, 3rd parties that would handle the consumer data and regulations, and retailers that would implement the concept and technologies.

We defined how our concept and technology would fit into their near-future system, and the roadmap for integration for all stakeholders. 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).