TLDR

Challenge

Our objective was to make the order status more clear and enable users to easily make changes to an order via digital channels. The business goal was to save several millions of dollars by reducing the number of calls to pharmacies and Customer Care.

Solution

Using color and grouping related information together, I enabled users to find and understand their order status more easily.

Patients and members can customize their view with clearer sort and filter options, quickly ingest information about an order and know what to do if there is an issue.

Background

CVS Health is a health care innovation company that provides retail pharmacies and clinics across the US, pharmacy benefits management and specialty drug services, among other services.

The Challenge

As a way to elevate care for patients and members, CVS/caremark and CVS/pharmacy wanted to improve the digital experience of tracking and managing prescription orders. While the functionality existed via its digital platforms, in many cases the information was out of date, incomplete or confusing, driving customers to call the pharmacy or Customer Care team.

Note: The design concepts I have shared here were created based on research and other previous work. Due to the sensitive nature of personal information, I am not allowed to share actual assets from my work.

My Role

I was responsible for understanding and advocating user needs, and accountable for transforming ideas from initial concept into simple, delightful user experiences. I was the senior UX designer on an agile team, along with a visual designer and UX content writer, that was part of a SAFe Agile Train.

Process

• Methodologies: expert interviews, heuristic evaluation, usability testing, user journey mapping, sketches, wireframes, competitive review, UI design
• Design stack: paper, Excel, Sketch, InVision, Usertesting.com

 

Research & Synthesis

Having never worked in the healthcare vertical before, I had to learn the ins and outs of filling a prescription, working with insurance, and what, exactly, a pharmacy benefits manager is. I began by meeting with several designers on other projects to find out what they knew, the problems they were facing and what had been done in the past. Additionally, I interviewed members of the Voice of Customer team, who collect feedback via surveys, live polls and data from live user sessions.

While there was a wealth of knowledge about patients and members, including robust personas, we did not understand how users thought about prescriptions. In order to optimize the information architecture of the Order History page, we needed to know how the users were thinking and prioritizing prescription information. We needed to know why the current experience wasn’t working in order to know how to fix it.

In an ideal world, I would have partnered with the UX research team to set up and conduct interviews with users. However, we had a tight timeline and needed to pick some low-hanging fruit for the development team to work on. So instead, I oversaw a heuristic evaluation and created a prototype of the existing experience (with dummy data) to conduct unmoderated usability testing with Usertesting.com. This way, we could highlight the biggest usability hurdles and tackle them while we built a UX runway.

Key Insights 

• Users are either very organized and want to check the status of current orders, as well as what might be coming up soon, or very disorganized and are waiting until they are out of medication to check on a refill order.
• High-volume callers are older in age and have over 8 meds on average
• The second highest reason members use the mobile app is to check order status
• The meaning of Rx statuses were vague, and users were not sure what to do to resolve a problem
• Research participants did not know where to look to find important information, such as order status. The content hierarchy was too flat.
• Users had a hard time understanding the filtering and sorting options. They were confused by icons that represented different actions.

 

User Journey Mapping

Before we could make any improvements, we needed to know what the current process of ordering a prescription (either new, refill or renewal). I started to create a journey map with all the information I had gathered from interviews. During that process, I learned that the digital team did not own all communication messages sent to members. Other business units, including the retail side and marketing, had separate messages and schedules.

Historically, the digital, retail and marketing teams did not work together when creating communications (and in several cases they had opposing goals for communication). In order to get a complete picture of the user journey, I initiated meetings people from both teams to map out all messages.  

From all these conversations, I compiled a bigger picture in the form of a comprehensive user journey map, including all SMS, email and IVR communications. 

This helped visualize to the distinct teams how

• Users are inundated by messages regarding prescriptions.
• Certain status updates caused user confusion, and prompted them to call the pharmacy or Care for more clarity.
• Users did not know they could easily resolve the issues online because messages didn’t prompt them.

“These user journeys allow everyone to see the complete picture, whereas they could only see smaller bits before.” – Cheryl, UX Researcher

 

Ideate & Evaluate

We still needed to conduct more research to gain a better sense of user behavior and their mental model. But we had a good place to start.

Competitive Research

First, I looked at design patterns used by ecommerce and shipping companies, as well as services with multiple steps. Other CVS design pods had also done previous work designing status trackers. Using these concepts, I came up with different concepts to address the issue of understanding your prescription status.

Colors help patients and members quickly determine if they need to take action on an order. Clear descriptions and instructions helped them know what action, if any, to take.

 

From usability tests, we also knew users found the filter and sort options confusing. Again, I did competitive research to look at various filter display options. 

 

Design: Improving the order management experience

Our main challenge was designing for multiple use cases: locating a specific order that you need to manage, managing orders as a caregiver, getting an overview of all active or upcoming orders. I sketched out several potential solutions that would present (what we assume are) the primary variables, while making access to advanced filters easy.

We discussed the pros and cons of multiple different filtering concepts, and decided upon the version that would provide the most options without taking up too much space on a mobile device. We planned to test a prototype with users to determine if it was better.

From there, I created wireframes and high-fidelity mockups.

Better visual distinction between patients, fulfillment group and order status help the member distinguish characteristics of certain order types and quickly achieve their goals.

 

Next Steps

I wasn’t able to see this project through to the end because I moved to Medellín, Colombia, but, given the opportunity, I would have conducted more research, including interviews and card sorting exercises to determine how to best prioritize information. I would also have continued to iterate on designs and create mobile versions to validate with users.

The team and I were working on improving the messages sent to users and synching the back end systems, so the status would be consistent no matter where users looked.

I still have many questions and features to consider, such as: Would a collapsed section show a summary or just the date? Could we add a scroll on the side with dates to let users easily navigate to a certain date?

However, I am confident we made a lot of progress towards enabling patients and members to track and manage their orders quickly and easily using the CVS Health digital portals.