Walgreens Boots Alliance
Next-gen pharmaceutical app
Overview
Walgreens’ initiative to redesign its computer system IC+ (Intercom Plus) for pharmacists and technicians was an fun project that included many interesting UX challenges.
This case study includes two discovery workstreams:
The first one is about viewing and registering patient profiles as well as intake of new prescriptions.
The second one is more around the global search experience.
Services
Discovery, Wireframes, Journey Mapping,, Prototyping Design, Content Management
TEAM
UX lead | Product Manager | Project Manager UX Researcher | Business Analyst | Visual Designer
PROJECT TIMELINE
9 months
PRODUCT
Internal web application (web and tablet)
Categories
Healthcare | Desktop Application | B2B | Retail
Patient Registration Discovery
A digital experience designed for pharmacists and technicians to deliver patient safety and efficiency
The big picture
Medical errors are according to a 2016 article in the British Medical Journal, the third leading cause of death in the United States just behind heart disease and cancer. While medical errors may be too many things, it is safe to assume that errors caused by the interaction between humans and computer software is one piece in the puzzle towards reducing the amount of errors and promoting better patient safety.
Challanges
Discover the next-gen streamlined digital experience for pharmacists and technicians to look up patients in the system, register new ones, intake prescription and promote better patient safety.
Approach
I approached the discovery work balancing two key elements: working with existing user research findings and big-picture thinking that helped drives creativity and innovation of what the future of the pharmacy software may be like.
research phase
Constant learnings
Legacy system training sessions
Learning about the tool, reading manuals, watching videos, and playing around with the actual software almost everyday
Existing research documentation
Reading through research findings docs from usability testing and user interviews was consultant work and sufincalty build knowledge around user behavior and needs.
In-store observations
Visiting the physical Walgreens pharmacy watching and learning about dairy operation of the workers was another important aspect of the search
Teams & Business research
Meeting and interviewing designs and stakeholders significantly boosted the learnings by fill in the missing information and providing more context.
Research Phase
Identifying important key questions
While finding the answers takes time and effort, it is also crucial to identify the right questions to ask and build team conscientious around them.
DESIGN phase
Terms & definitions
This was an excellent design exercise that greatly contributed to gaining team consensus. It revealed the gaps and the patterns between what team members, think, view, and define things like patient vs customer or what is patient safety actually is. Putting together a document with basic terms & definitions that most team members agreed on was enough to move on to the next step.
DESIGN phase
Organizing the content building blocks
DESIGN phase
Layout mapping
Designing the screen layouts included the decisions made from the previous design iteration with the building blocks, the content hierarchy, and the design decisions backed by user studies.
Key design decision led by research: Users want to be able to avoid scroll when they view patient information. How we can design a concise display that can surface more information yet be adaptive so they can add new patient information.
DESIGN phase
Functional wirframes
Functional wireframes that reflects user interactions and UI component
DESIGN phase
Validating operational workflows with POs and PMs
Before heading to mapping out the various user flows, it was helpful to validate the logic and accuracy of the new proposed core workflows and find any gaps.
DESIGN phase
User flows mapping
The goal was to map out all the major workflows for users to handle intake of one patient vs multiple, register one or multiple patients, fill information, all the way through fulfillment.
TESTING phase
Running moderated testing with real users
We wanted to test our assumption by putting the designs in front of real users to get feedback. To do that, we started by discussing what we were trying to learn and the study goals. We also discussed things like the type of research, methodology, and timelines. Once we reached alignment, we started working on the fully-wired prototype which we needed for the testing.
Then our UX researcher scheduled 1:1 moderated sessions with our users. After the sessions, the researcher shared a deck consolidating the finding and additional information about the research we needed to push the design forward. We continued to validate design decisions through multiple loops of testing & refining until we had fully fleshed out user flows.
Learning Phase
Outcome
Synthesizing finding after testing sessions
We learned new things almost in every testing session after watching the recorded videos.
The winning designs were the ones the we continued to evolve and build upon.
Product meetings
We scheduled time with product owners to run by the study findings that initiated the discussion on which features we should include in the MVP and which not. Those meetings were essential to building global alignment with the team regarding which designs are moving forwards and which to archive.
