The Last Time You’ll
‘Fugghedaboutit’
Designing for Social Good: RxEMIND
MADE IN NYC
RxEMIND
Project
Medication Alarm
Volunteer UX Designer | 2023
Project Scope
How can we build better habits when it comes to taking medication?
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have changed some of the quantitative data and omitted some information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of RxEMIND.
RxEMINDER is a medication reminder app developed and designed in New York City. It was designed to help users build habits of taking medication with a catch, an alarm you need to manually turn off. Gone are the days when we can all just ignore notifications because taking your medication is actually really vital to your health.
SKILLS
UX Design
UX Research
Information Architect
User Testing
Wireframing
Prototyping
TEAM
UX Designer Generalist
MY ROLE
UX Designer leading the app and responsive website design from
conception to delivery.
The Goals
The Problem
People forget to take their medication every day.
The average person takes 4 different prescriptions.
1 in 2 people miss
a dose.
That is a major problem resulting in 89,000 premature deaths according to pillsy.com Article written by Jeff L.
My father was one of the people who missed taking several medications. So my involvement with this app does hit closer to home.
This was an opportunity to tackle a worldwide problem starting with a device that everyone has in the palm of their hands every waking minute.
Replace timed medication notifications with alarms
Allow users to build better medication habits
Allow users to learn more about the medicine they’re taking
Overall, the final designs proved to be successful. Users approved the idea of using an alarm versus a notification because alarms need to be manually turned off. Notifications can be ignored and with enough time, people with med reminder apps that use notifications ultimately forget to take their medicine. The med alarm that RxEMIND offers fixes that.
Final Designs
Demo In Action
This is a recording of the prototype in action. You can test it out yourself here. If you have any suggestions or feedback, feel free to let me know!
Building Good Habits
Developed for mobile devices, RxEMIND uses features such as vibration and ringtones in tandem with alarms to let users take action. Other similar apps only send notifications that are easily ignored by the busybody and the forgetful.
RxEMIND was designed to build life-saving habits by forcing users to take notice of the medication intake schedule they’ve saved on their mobile devices.
User Research
I used knowledge from conducted interviews and research to ideate and develop interview questions, which were then used to fuel more interviews. Most interview participants reported missing medication once in a while.
The feedback received through research made it very clear that users would be open and willing to work towards improving and developing an app that will help reduce the number of medications missed.
Key Takeaways
Looking at the competitors closely, while there are minor features not available, the main feature that RxEMIND has is using the alarm function over using notifications.
Affinity Diagram and Insight Identification
I allowed several volunteers to help me conduct user testing to test my low-fidelity prototype. I gathered information as much information as I could of how they felt about the prototype and gave them specific tasks to test the prototype’s ease of use. These volunteers were people who use personal medication reminders and are from different genders and ages. I asked them the following questions to measure qualitative feedback:
How easy or difficult was the med scheduling process? Is there anything you would change about it?
How easy or difficult was it to turn off the alarm? Is there anything you would change?
How easy or difficult was it to track your medication? Is there anything you would change?
How do you feel about the app overall? What did you like and dislike about it?
User Personas
I created these user personas based on the research and answers from the usability tests and interviews conducted with the volunteers. This helps keep the ideation process focused on the target market and hopefully solves their frustrations as well as achieving their goals.
Market Research
An audit of a few competitor’s products provided direction on gaps and opportunities to address with the RxEMIND App
I conducted a competitive analysis of direct competitors that offer similar services as RxEMIND. While they’re all similar in function, they do have stark differences when it comes to what each app offers. Some even have work with pharmacies and have medicine delivery features.
Understanding and identifying which feature users rely on in the app is what I wanted to find out and implement to RxEMIND.
Sure the competing brands may have time on their side, but when I conducted a competitive audit, they shared many flaws, but also some pretty neat features that I’d like to add to RXEMINDER in the future
The problem with those apps is, people use them for a few days, and forget about them, due to their clunky design and business-oriented aspects.
RxEMINDER will be completely free to use with no microtransactions.
It’ll simply be for the people. Possibly open source in the future.
Conducting the research to see its usability and filling in the gaps that our competitors did not.
High Fidelity Prototype
Usability Test #2
Notable Changes
While users do like the idea of taking action and accountability to turn off the alarm, they wanted the ability to customize sounds and include vibration for when they’re at work.
Here are a couple of quality-of-life changes made to the prototype by popular demand :
Added ability to replace the method of turning off the alarm
Included a ‘one-tap mode’ to turn off alarms instead of sliding
Ability to change alarm tune
Replaced the full monthly calendar with a sliding calendar to save space on real estate
I chose pastel colors to evoke calmness while users use the app
Impact
Users shared that the app made allowed them to take accountability by pressuring them to turn off alarm and not ignore a simple notification. The alarm is there to remind them and engage them to take medication on time and not forget again.
Information Architecture
RxEMIND is designed to be very linear and the structure of the information thought process shows it.
Design Iterations
These are the first hand drawn iterations with user pain points and conducted competitive analysis in mind.
The thought process throughout the whole iteration had the user journey as the priority.
Wireframes
These wireframes shown are designed to showcase the necessary features of the RxEMIND app itself. They include:
Account creation
Medicine lookup
Medicine inventory
Scheduling med alarm
Medicine archive
Account Creation
Scheduling Medication
Med Reminder Alarm
Medication Inventory and Archive
Next Steps
The next time I get the opportunity to work on this project, I would like to include more helpful features such as:
Research and provide additional useful features that can e built onto RxEMIND
Work with doctors to implement virtual diagnosis
Collaborate with Express Scripts for medication delivery and payment systems
Include video instructions for medication that requires more attention ie. Insulin shots
Lessons Learned
The next time I get the opportunity to work on this project, I would like to include more helpful features such as:
Solving one problem may present new problems.
Design thinking to solve as many problems with a solution instead of creating them
Go through each step of design while implementing suggestions from feedback helps create solutions
Increase accessibility for all users in areas never thought possible.
Thank you for getting to the end! I hope you learned something new about me or the project. I have other projects you can check out.
Contact me if you want to collaborate together!