TL;DR
Prescription medications can be incredibly expensive. How might we help patients save on their meds when visiting their local pharmacies?
NimbleRx is a startup that enables patients throughout the US to get their medications delivered directly to their door and at a low price. In 2022, they started to scale beyond medication delivery by expanding to a price comparison feature to enable patients to save on their prescriptions at their local pharmacies.
How might we design a price comparison feature that emphasizes patients values towards price saving?
The Solution
Patients can find coupons in two primary ways: selecting from Popular Searches which contain the most common medications that patients look for, or utilizing the Search bar to find specific medications.
The results page populates with the most common dosage, form, and quantity of the medication. Furthermore, this page shows the closest options of pharmacies for the medication, in which patients can also filter by the price of the medication as well.
Patients can find coupons in two primary ways: selecting from Popular Searches which contain the most common medications that patients look for, or utilizing the Search bar to find specific medications.
Upon searching, the results page populates with the most common dosage, form, and quantity of the medication. Furthermore, this page shows the closest options of pharmacies for the medication, in which patients can also filter by the price of the medication as well.
Once a pharmacy is selected on the Medication Results page, patients navigate to the coupon for this medication that they can download as well as view more information as to how to use the coupon.
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Patients can either show their pharmacist the coupon page or save the coupon to their device by texting themselves a copy.
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As part of my onboarding to the design team as well as getting familiarized with the project, my manager brought me up to speed with the current designs and phases for the Pricing project. I began my process by reviewing the previous designs utilized in past fake-door testing and getting familiarized with the business goals for the project.
Key Business Goals
- Gain an understanding of our patient’s perspectives towards price comparison methods when purchasing medications
- Identify how we can refine and build upon similar price-comparison offerings that patients gravitate to
Learning about the previous designs and research experiments gave me great context into how to start defining the rest of the coupon flow within the Pricing feature. At the same time, I began looking at similar applications in order to identify design consistencies and considerations that can be applied to Nimble’s platform.
This competitive analysis gave me better insight on the common design patterns used across similar coupon applications and eCommerce listings. I discussed these patterns with my manager, a senior product designer, in which we bounced off different design ideas that took these findings into account.
- Alternative methods of Saving Coupons - Other than just sharing a screen of the coupon to the pharmacist, other applications offered users alternative methods to save their coupons. From this, it was imperative to offer PNG image download and text sharing.
- Pharmacy Location Information - The addition of pharmacy location information was inconsistent across several competitors, but for Nimble’s case, this information was imperative due to the nature of variable pricing across local pharmacies.
- Sort & Filter - Competitors offered certain sorting options such as by location, price, and most popular. From previous data and user research conducted by team members in this project, we moved forward with location and price-based sorting, as these were the most important factors that affect our patient’s decision-making.
Throughout this project, I created multiple variations of the key screens in the pricing user flow. With a concrete design system, this meant familiarizing myself with our internal design conventions and making sure that components were being used consistently throughout the entire feature. Designing multiple iterations of the same screen often meant weighing the pros and cons of certain use cases. After iterating, I would discuss the benefits of certain design choices over others in each iteration with my design team in order to consolidate into a single design or designs to discuss with the rest of the product team.
After internal reviews with the design team, product, engineering, and business stakeholders, we had released the new price comparison feature; however, efforts towards further refinement of the UX still continued as we started tracking data of patient's usage of the feature.
For these efforts, I began leading brainstorming meetings with our product team to further align our goals for this new release. From my initial handoffs, I learned the importance of consistent design updates from ideation to finalization with those in and outside of the product team. With this mindset, I kept iterating in design as usual, but allowed opportunities for different stakeholders to brainstorm with me.
While many of these brainstorming sessions were conducted during meetings, consistent design updates also meant asynchronous collaboration as well. Meeting debriefs, Q&A sessions, and asking for feedback in Slack made this second release run much more smoothly than the initial launch of Pricing.
Brainstorming sessions with the product team and co-working sessions with the design team helped to further refine Pricing screens for this final release. Handing off these finalized designs meant annotating visual changes, behavioral changes, and any use cases to consider during implementation.
People often say that when you work at a startup, you wear a lot of hats, and I can definitely attest to that. Throughout this project alone, I had the opportunity to collaborate with multiple stakeholders for Nimble's new Pricing feature. From designing new components for the project to discussing copy changes with the Marketing Team, it was a rewarding experience to be involved in every step of releasing a new feature. Looking back, I leave this project with many significant learnings to take with me during my journey as a designer.
- Learning how to take in feedback - Collaborating with the product team and business executives meant learning how to listen to feedback and defend design decisions. I initially struggled with this skill at the beginning stages of this project, but found that continual collaboration that looped in key stakeholders of project helped all members have a shared understanding of how to move forward with each phase of design.
- Take Initiative - My first design handoff felt daunting due to the nature of articulating my work. This concern greatly diminished once I realized the power to asking questions or scheduling a quick chat with team members whenever I felt stuck!
