Transforming Medication Tracking for Better Patient Outcomes
Project Brief
RemindMed is a thoughtfully designed medication tracker aimed at supporting adults who juggle complex treatment regimens. The app’s primary focus is on creating a straight-forward and stress-free experience, ensuring that users can easily organize their prescriptions and adhere to their schedules. With accessibility and ease of use at the forefront, RemindMed offers a simple and effective solution for people of all ages and technical skill levels.
As the Senior Product Designer, I led the end-to-end design process. I conducted UX research, and created user journey maps, wireframes, high-fidelity mockups, and prototypes, focusing on delivering intuitive, user-centered design solutions.
The main challenge was designing a user-friendly tracker that could handle complex medication routines without overwhelming users. The app needed to support detailed inputs like dosages, inventory, instructions, and recurring reminders while remaining simple and accessible.
We developed a user-friendly onboarding flow that allows users to input detailed medication information in a clear, multi-step process. The interface is designed to accommodate a high level of specificity for each medication, enabling users to add essential details like dosage, instructions, and reminders. At the same time, the flow is flexible, allowing users to skip any unnecessary steps, ensuring they can personalize their experience without feeling overwhelmed.
Competitive Analysis
To kick off my research, I conducted a thorough competitive analysis to understand the landscape of existing medication tracking apps. I downloaded and explored several popular options, including MyTherapy, EveryDose, and Max, performing a UX audit to identify strengths and areas for improvement. This analysis provided valuable insights into the market and allowed me to brainstorm ways to differentiate our app. It also helped me refine key user flows, ensuring we could offer a more intuitive and effective solution that better met the needs of our target audience.
Findings
My competitive analysis revealed key insights that would directly shape my design approach. First, I identified the need for a simple, streamlined medication-adding flow that would minimize complexity for users, ensuring they could easily input medications, dosages, schedules, and inventory. I also recognized the importance of a distraction-free design, with a focus on functionality over visual embellishments.
User Interviews
During the interview, my questions included:
- How do you currently track medications?
- Have you, or would you consider using an application to track your medication schedule? Why, or why not?
- What pain points/frustrations have you encountered with your current approach?
- What do you do when you miss a dose of medication, how do you log or account for that? How do you know when to take your next dose?
- With your integrative approach, do ever run into medications prescribed by different doctors that shouldn’t be taken together? What do you when this happens?
I’m using my phone’s calendar for reminders. I set events with daily occurrences. But sometimes, I’m not with the patient when they take the medication. So, I have to check when I see them and see if they remember taking it.
It's tricky because sometimes the patient will ask me, did I take the [medication name]? And it's on the calendar still, did I forget to mark this off? Do we still need to take it? What if we’re not sure? Do we wait the 24 hours for the next dose, or do I go back and count pills [to calculate if they took it by looking at pills remaining].
Patient Caretaker
Findings
Their tracking methods presented many pain points and opportunities for errors in a 24 hour cycle.
- The paper method relied on the the paper being with one of them at the time of the medication being taken.
- The calendar event method does not contain the flexibility to set up advanced schedules for medications, as noted by the caretaker. For some medications, there are instructions to take intermittently. For example, taking a medication 3 times a day for a week, and then pausing for the next week. Tracking this interval on a notepad, or with a calendar event is a complicated user experience.
- It did not contain medication related instructions for what to do with missed doses. The patient mentioned frequently running into the issue of vomiting, due to nausea side effects of treatment. When this happened shortly after taking a medication, they would need to search for the medication documentation to remind them of what they should do. For some medications, they should take it late, for others, they should wait and take an extra does at their next scheduled time.
User Experience Objectives
- Pill Tracking Inventory - A feature that tracks medication inventory levels, ensuring users are aware of their supply.
- Refill reminders - Automated reminders to refill prescriptions when inventory is running low, helping users stay on top of their medication.
- Intermittent schedule support - The ability to set custom medication cycles (e.g., 4 days on, 2 days off), catering to complex treatment regimens.
- Notes - A space for users to log notes or track any side effects, empowering them to manage their health more effectively.
Mid-Fidelity
I focused on mapping out the essential questions needed to set up medications and reminders. Since every user’s needs are different, I made sure the flow was flexible. Users could skip questions that didn’t apply to them, while still having the option to add detailed information for more complex medication schedules. This balance was key to creating a design that works for both simple and complicated use cases.
High-Fidelity
The medication setup flow was divided into three clear steps to help users understand their progress and how much was left to complete. The visual design was crafted to keep users engaged and focused, using clean layouts and intuitive elements to guide them seamlessly through each step of the process.
Design Features
Scroll through the main features in the user flow to add medication. These help the user track where they are in the flow and understand the significance of each question.
The flow is split into 3 sections, labeled to help the user understand the purpose of each section. Each section has a progress bar that fills as the user answers or skips each question. Once the step is complete, the user can return to it to review their answers by clicking that step’s tab.
There is a text preview which displays the purpose of each step. This is to help the user understand the context of how this step fits into the medication-adding flow.
Step 2 of the flow is where the user adds critical information such as whether the user needs to take the medicine with food, or refrain from alcohol while taking.
The active tab is indicated by the circle surrounding the number and the green text, while Step 3, which hasn’t been reached yet, is inactive until the user completes Step 2.
Step 3 is where the user sets up the reminders for when to take the medication.
After adding the first instance, the application will calculate when to set the other reminders based on the time intervals added by the user in Step 1. The user can adjust the reminder times if they would like to customize them.
Interactive Prototype
To bring the design to life and test the user experience, I created an interactive prototype of the medication-adding flow. This prototype made it easy to validate the multi-step process, ensuring it felt intuitive and straightforward. It also provided a clear, hands-on look at how the design would work in practice, making it easier to gather feedback and make quick improvements. Prototyping was a key part of the process, helping to turn ideas into a tangible, user-centered solution.
Takeaways
By tackling the complexities of a user with a highly detailed medication routine, I was able to build a flexible system that can easily scale to meet a broad range of user needs.
While I went into the user interviews with a list of questions, I made it more of a conversation than just a Q&A session. This sparked ideas for product features that would not have come up if I had strictly followed my questions. For example, the interview revealed the need to set up intermittent schedules for a medication (1 day on, 1 day off, etc). Listening to these users helped me focus on what truly matters, creating a solution that makes it easier for people to manage their health.
Iteration was key in transforming initial concepts into a polished, user-friendly product. Between mid-fidelity and high-fidelity, I showed the concept to the users and received valuable feedback. I was able to add critical information to the workflow, such as whether the user needs to take the medication with food, before eating, or after eating. By continuously refining the design based on feedback, I was able to improve usability and ensure that every step of the user flow was intuitive and aligned with real needs.