Online Pharmacy on E-commerce Website - UX Research and Design
Research and Design Project time:
2022.11-2023.02
The team and stakeholders:
Product Owner, Professional Service Department (department of pharmacists), Front-end Developers, Content Writer
Background and purpose
The Product Owner approached me with the pharmacy project to increase the conversion rate, and online sales and decrease the cancellations rate of online prescription orders. The design manager came with the requirements to make the content easy to understand and to design the content pages to look simple
My role and responsibilities: UX Researcher & Designer, Project Coordinator
Planning qualitative customer research and creating CX artifacts, including Empathy Map and Customer Journey Map
Advocating for the customers and influencing the stakeholders to adopt the HCD approach
Facilitating internal team workshop to define the scope
Sitemap, User Flow, Service Flow, and Information Architecture
Presenting to key stakeholders and gathering feedback to iterate
What did I start with?
Start with data:
Instead of jumping into design and content writing, I started with analyzing quantitative data, conducting user research, and analyzing the data.
As a designer, I’m data-driven. Before thinking about what I’m designing, the quantitative and qualitative data provide insights for me to understand who I’m designing for and why I’m designing. It’s all about making the right decisions to create a holistically good customer experience.
Below is my research process overview and UX research deliverables.
Collaboration Workshop
In the workshop, I presented the findings to advocate for our customers and strongly advocated for the customers’ holistic experience. We brainstormed some solutions for the customers’ pain points and needs. During a technical estimation session with the development team, we agreed together on the scope for the first release using the MVP method.
The changes included for this release:
How might we make the experience of sending the scripts intuitive?
Solution: Design the electronic prescription online submission before customers add the product to the cart.
How might we better communicate to the customers to increase awareness of prescription online orders, and to guide customers through the order process?
Solution: Redesign the content pages according to the customer’s online journey, to answer customers’ key questions and concerns that we gathered from the user research.
How might we improve the customers’ after-purchase experience to make them feel they are always updated about the orders?
Solution: New transactional emails for online pharmacy customers to manage customers’ expectations and show how engaged we are.
My design deliverables after scoping the project:
Electronic Prescription submission user flow and low-fi wireframes, usability testing, and iterations
Content pages site maps and low-fi wireframes
Prescription PDP(Product Details Page) low-fi designs, usability testing, and design iterations
Patient profile Hi-Fi designs at check out and user account
Transactional email flow map and templates design
Please see some examples of my design deliverables below, and please note the images were made to be unreadable on purpose.
Below is an example of a concept design testing plan. The design is for the prescription product landing page, with the new features, including patient profile, and eScript online submission.
Presentation and results:
A final presentation was conducted to the key stakeholders to get buy-in and feedback.
Instead of showing just the changes, I think it’s important to present an overview of our work, the thinking process of why and how we made the decisions, the variety of options we have considered, and the reasons why some options don’t work.
During the presentation, the customer empathy map and customer journey map played a very efficient role to the allow people to zoom out and think from a holistic view.
Results: The audience was very engaged throughout the presentation, and trusted us for making all these changes to improve the customer experience.
Challenges and reflections:
The first and most difficult challenge is to communicate with stakeholders. The stakeholders come from all different disciplines, it is so normal that they haven’t heard of Human Centred Design approach. We need to treat our stakeholders as humans, empathizing with them. Persistently advocating for customer experience is very crucial.
There was another presentation we conducted at the start of the project that didn’t go well. We kept the presentation only focusing on the digital design changes we were going to conduct. It forced the stakeholders to jump out of their disciplines and dive into the digital lens immediately. The result of doing that was defensiveness from the audience and being questioned if we had considered the involvement of their parts in the process.
The second challenge is to get access to users’ data within a limited time frame. My first step in design thinking is to understand the end users. However, because of strict regulations including patient privacy, we couldn’t get access to customers’ data as quickly as we needed to. Instead of waiting on conducting customer research for future projects, I initiated the store visits to interview our customers.
The third challenge is the strict regulations in the pharmacy industry. This fundamentally leads to the different customer experiences between the online pharmacy and common online retail. It is significant to have a thorough understanding of the regulations and contextual knowledge.