Moving from analogue to digital

Northway already has a successful system that they use in their brick-and-mortar locations to fill their customer’s orders. The success of their system led them to want a digital on-boarding system in order to promote their service to a Manitoba-wide audience.

How might we help an innovative pharmacy digitize their on-boarding process to reach more customers?

Taking into consideration the pharmacists’ needs

One main caveat was that pharmacists and stakeholders required that the digital on-boarding process be as similar as possible to their current in-store process (including the manual validation and entering of customer data). This is so the new system could be built off of the existing in-pharmacy database (Kroll), allowing the pharmacy to use their existing software. 

There were minor changes made to the new user flow, to give pharmacists enough time to validate users’ information. The on-boarding process would be split into two phases: for the first phase, users would input their general contact information. Once pharmacists received a potential user's contact data, they would manually add that person to the Kroll system, validating the information as they went. Once the initial contact information had been validated, pharmacists will send an email to users, activating the second phase of the on-boarding where users could complete the rest of the sign-up process.

Usability testing

Even though I was no longer involved with the Goods & Services team at this stage, there are three main assumptions/features that I began to usability test with potential customers.

For the MVP version of the product, all customer contact information inputs were included on one screen. However, based on competitor benchmarks, I was concerned that displaying 20 fields on one screen could overwhelm users. During “think-aloud” usability testing sessions, potential customers stated they were not concerned by the number of fields and liked that it involved less clicking. However, they were concerned that if they inputted information incorrectly, they would not be able to find it easily. Error states and callouts would address not being able to find the correction, but I wanted to test another solution: dividing the contact fields across 3 screens, allowing one section to be reviewed at a time. While users wanted to quickly move through the signup process, they wanted to also track their progress easily.

Throughout the on-boarding flow, business and agency stakeholders were adamant about using a drag-and-drop interface for uploading scans of health and insurance cards. This was implemented during the initial design, but potential customers stated during testing that they did not feel it was secure enough, since they would submit images of their health/insurance cards and prescription slips. This issue could be resolved by letting users add their information via text fields with an optional drag-and-drop interface, which customers were receptive to during further testing. While this would leave more room for user error, all user information will be confirmed with a pharmacist during the scheduled consultation at the end of the process.

In the initial design, the last screen of the on-boarding process only stated that a pharmacist would be in contact with the user to schedule their consultation. However, based on comments in the interviews stating that users did not want to wait around for their prescriptions or to talk to a pharmacist, I was not sure if this would be a user-goal-meeting solution. While this may not be possible due to Kroll limitations, it is assumed that users would prefer to schedule their own consultation with pharmacists, instead of waiting for the pharmacist to contact them. However, all of these assumptions and solutions require further usability testing to confirm.