Tell me what you
really, really want
Designing with pharmacists in mind
Research, service design, UX / UI design
6 min read
Shoppers Online Pharmacy lets customers manage their prescriptions online, by email or by text message.
Pharmacists have an enterprise application – a dashboard – that links to this customer-facing product. I conducted qualitative research at Shoppers Drug Mart stores across the GTA to shed some light on the dashboard’s low use. The results were surprising and changed the roadmap of an entirely different team within the company. In the process, I learned a lot about how to make research insights have real impact.
In this case study:
The problem: Low engagement from stores
What I did: Qualitative research that led to real impact
The results: A 123% increase in store engagement
What I learned: A few takeaways
Highlights
Product: Shoppers Drug Mart Online Pharmacy
Users: Shoppers Drug Mart pharmacist and their teams
Product by the numbers: 2.4M users/accounts, 3,600+ enterprise users, enterprise user dashboard in Shoppers Drug Mart stores nation-wide
Role: Researcher, Lead UX/product designer
Other team members: Luke Lockhart (Product manager)
Timeline: 6 weeks
Sector: Healthcare, Pharmacy, Retail
Skills & methods: Qualitative research, Generative research, Customer interviews, UX design, Facilitation
Tools: Sketch, Abstract, Zeplin, Realtimeboard
Artifacts: Research report, wireframe sketches, screens, presentation decks
The problem
On a typical day, as data showed us, pharmacists didn’t open our dashboard much. They signed up very few patients for our digital services – the figure wavered at around three per store a week. Hundreds of stores didn’t open the application at all.
But we knew that pharmacists generally saw the benefits of our digital services*. It could save time and labour for them in the long term. For their patients, they agreed, it was the future. We also knew that customers trusted their pharmacists immensely. A lot of research and business analysis we had pointed in one direction: pharmacists had the potential to greatly impact customer experience and business targets for our product. So why did our dashboard sit unused?
* Based on a survey and discussions with the pharmacist associates panel
(left) Online Pharmacy dashboard for Shoppers stores, where pharmacists can sign up patients for digital services and manage prescription settings; (right) An example of a digital service: refilling prescriptions through text messages
To understand the context better, I worked with the dev and operations teams to put together simplified flows for signing up patients for digital services in store
What I did
I conducted qualitative research that led to real impact for our enterprise users.
Fieldwork really opened my eyes
I conducted qualitative research at Shoppers Drug Mart stores across the GTA.
Working with the product manager to identify our hypotheses for low engagement from stores;
sketching out prototype ideas
Prototypes shown to pharmacists during research sessions
What I saw in the field really put things in context. Lineups at the pharmacy form quickly and out of nowhere. The phone is always ringing. Tasks are measured in seconds spent. Online Pharmacy dashboard is just one of the many applications pharmacists use in their busy days.
(top) Fieldwork photos; (bottom) Analysis and synthesis of the data points collected during research sessions
Taking a holistic view
All the prototypes I showed to pharmacists had ideas that were meant to entice them to use our dashboard. There was a snazzy notification center and there were a few handy ways to flag patients to sign up for Online Pharmacy. To all these ideas I heard a consistent and resounding “no”. In pharmacists’ jam-packed days, signing in to a new application every time you speak to a patient seemed to require a gargantuan effort. Our product simply didn’t fit in their workflow.
Pharmacists needed a few important features to be available in the application they keep open every single day. And it wasn’t an application designed or managed by my team.
Photos from the field, while observing different stages of the pharmacy team workflow
A simplified visualization of various applications used in filling a prescription
Our application (bottom row) played a very small part in that process
Quotes from pharmacist interviews
Moving the needle
The work that followed was getting this message across in a way that rallied the different teams. With five different teams involved, our shared goal was to make pharmacists’ days easier. For my team, that would free up pharmacists’ time to help us with our business targets. I ran a fairly typical meeting showing research findings in a short impactful deck. What made it effective was narrowing in on the messages that resonated with the audience and having people in the room with whom I had a pre-existing relationship of trust. I then built more on my relationships and empowered others to circulate the research findings at more meetings for other teams involved.
A presentation deck with the summary of key research findings
All of this resulted in the least exciting UX/UI in my career: a tab with some radio buttons in an application my team didn’t manage, with a design that wasn’t created by me. But it fit with the daily pharmacy workflow and made sense to our enterprise users. It was far more impactful than any of the feature ideas we originally were so eager to build.
Changes to the HealthWatch application that resulted from the research findings
(the main application used by pharmacists in their daily work)
Other research findings
I came back from the field with a handful of tweaks we could make to the UX of our dashboard.
Some examples of updates to the Online Pharmacy enterprise user dashboard
(left) Providing information about why certain functionality was not available for medication management
(right) Enabling the pharmacy team to control notification settings for their patients
Another nugget from my research findings was that pharmacists were asking for more control over medication settings. They wanted to be able to make the same personalized decisions for patients through the digital platform as they already did in stores. As a result, the wider business team changed what medications qualified for the pharmacy Auto Refill service. We were able to give pharmacists the ability to override eligibility rules.
Giving pharmacists ability to override settings for prescriptions
(left) Changes to the enterprise user dashboard; (right) Changes to the customer-facing product
And finally, I synthesized best practices for patient outreach from top performing stores I visited. These became part of the best practices guidelines from the Shoppers Operations team shared with every store nationally.
Some ideas on patient outreach and the resulting customer experience, as recommended by pharmacists
Results
Over time, the work that was driven by my research study findings resulted in a 123% increase in prescription medications enrolled in digital services through Shoppers Drug Mart stores. This work was a combined effort of several teams, cutting across two applications and internal communications.
Research findings led to changes in two applications, a change in business rules for digitally-managed prescriptions and an update to store communications. All these combined efforts led to a 123% increase in store engagement over a period of 8 months.
Lessons learned
I saw how much you can learn from being wrong, and how important it is to be honest about it.
Being wrong makes us smarter
Often in larger organizations, the focus is on crafting the perfect success story for every initiative. But that presupposes that teams always know the right answers at the onset. This is rarely true. After analyzing the data points we collected, I looked back to the hypotheses we had before going into the field. Most of those turned out to be untrue. This meant we knew so little before we started the research, and found out so much to make better-informed decisions after.
Our best idea was their worst idea
Sometimes what seems like a promising product opportunity does not work in real life for enterprise users. Showing prototypes made us realize that certain features, like a notification centre, would not be successful. Pharmacy teams were already juggling multiple queues. This also prompted more research into other feature ideas that have similar challenges for these users, such as a pharmacist chat.