Helping pharmacy customers communicate and track their requests to the pharmacy so that pharmacy employees can efficiently and accurately fulfill requests while avoiding unnecessary patient and employee telephone interruptions.
For this freelance project, I explored the design of an app that helps pharmacy users to communicate with the pharmacy more easily and efficiently instead of waiting on the phone to talk to employees to get help. To understand the user better, I observed and interviewed real customers and employees and created a user map of their current workflow to understand their pain points. I used the associated insights to create personas for customers and employees and a journey map for potential app users.
I created visioning diagrams of possible systems for ideation and discussed them with the client. Based on client feedback, I constructed a paper prototype of the app e using Marvel. I used the prototype for user testing and asked the the users to perform three example tasks as part of the testing process. I documented feedback from user testing and incorporated it into a high fidelity prototype.
I started off the project with observing pharmacy employees and customers then interviewing them to understand their workflow and pain points. As a result of this process, I discovered that employees felt overstressed.
I put together a user map to understand what was causing employees to feel so stressed. Pharmacy employees want to provide excellent customer service. They need to make sure customers receive the correct prescription with the correct instructions and have the proper insurance information applied while processing payment. I discovered that phone calls were a huge distraction. There were many back and forth phone calls that tended to interrupt both customers and employees.
After observing the pharmacy work system and interviewing employees, I documented the goals of the business and its employees to understand the associated challenges and pain points that were getting in the way of achieving these goals.
Using the “how might we” approach, I turned the identified problems into questions to help identify potential solutions. I categorized questions into three major areas the pharmacy needed help with: System / Organizing, Workload / Stress, and Communication / Training. My analysis with the client indicated that reducing the distractions of fielding frequent phone calls and improving communication with the customers would be the highest leverage approach to achieve business, employee, and customer goals.
I constructed 3 different personas to better understand perspectives and pain points.
I tested the high fidelity prototype for a whole day to analyze the improvement in the workflow. The results indicated that the proposed app would reduce the number of phone calls handled every hour from 40 to 15. Each phone call on average required 30 seconds of talk time and 60 seconds of wait/hold time and interrupts the receiver each time a call is received. Each interruption also impacts customers, employees, and others around them and increases the chance that a distracted employee will make a mistake processing a prescription order.
Based on this data, the client estimated that the app would improve customer satisfaction by nearly 70% and save 12.5 minutes every hour per employee leading to 1 hour and 25 minutes in total per day. This will help expedite the prescription processing time leading to better customer satisfaction.