Tackle Your medication with a Beep -
Intuitive, portable, simple
Beeper is a school project for Form course at CCA. The goal of the project is to create design solutions around the healthcare industry and practice our skills in motion and visual design. Out of the natural empathy of the people who are on multiple prescription drugs, I chose the medication field and used the human-centered design method as well as a rapid prototype to create a better experience for them.
6 Weeks
(Autumn 2018)
Design Research
Market Analysis
Visual Design
Prototyping
User Testing
Christina Beard
Nowadays, a growing number of people in America live a life with medication. For diseases like hypertension and diabetes, having regular medication is crucial for the treatment. But with so many different kinds of medication to deal with, it's usually a great burden on them to properly take the medication as prescribed, which leads to huge amount of life lost and dramatical change in their health condition.
Americans are on at least one prescription drug
of them don’t take their medicines as prescribed
Americans die every year as a result
Beeper provides an intuitive, portable and simple solution to support people in tracking and finding the medication through a hardware+software system.
Beeper provides an intuitive interface for the user to check their daily medication. Also, with the help of the beep sticker, Beeper will guide the user to find the medication with the help of sound and light.
The Beeper application shows all the medication today on one clock, enabling users to quickly check them. With the "+" button on the downside, they can add/link the Beep sticker as well as adding a medication reminder.
Inputting the medication info has always been an annoying yet necessary part. Beeper application's database will automatically fill in the info as soon as the user enters the medication name, which drastically shortens the data entering time. Also, they can take a picture of the medicine to help them find it more easily.
It's time for the medication! The Beeper application sends a reminder to help the users find the medicine they need. When pressing the "Find My Med" button, a direction circle will appear to point the location of the med; meanwhile, the Beep sticker will start to sound.
The status of all the medications is shown in the same interface, allowing the users to quickly find it and take it.For the users who are on more than one prescription, beeper also supports multi-medication function, which shows all the medicines taken today on the interface.
There are a great many services, mobile apps, and medication boxes focused on helping people deal with this daily routine, but problems such as weight, usability, and intuition still need to be fixed to provide a better experience for the users.
In order to figure out the current pain point and opportunities, I interviewed two people on prescription drug using pillboxes or a medication app(Medisafe).
Based on their experience, I drew the current user journey of them. Both of them experienced some difficulties in inserting medication info, quickly finding the right medication, and checking the missing pills.
In order to find the proper design solution, I started a brainstorm session and gathered ideas. After discussing with users, classmates, and my advisor, I decided to go with the beep sticker idea.
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The beeper system consists of two parts, the application and the beep sticker. In order to work together, I designed the task flow of linking the sticker and medication reminder function.
I started by building the necessary modules for the system. Use removable segments to test the user flow, iterate, and collect feedback quickly.
Feedback received:
1. The icon of the uploading medication picture is misleading.
2. The 'DONE' button has multiple positions, which confused the user
3. Adding beep stickers and adding medication are separate, which can be combined together into one add button.
To make sure that sound can successfully guide users to find the medication, I conducted 3 rounds of "Game" with the user.
In the first two rounds, testers were given a bag of different medication and asked to find the specific medication within it. In the third round, testers were to find the specific medication hiding in an area. As a conclusion, the groups with the help of sound(which is a small alarm hiding in the target medication box) performed much better than the one without sound.
1. The sound is more useful when you do not know where you put your medication like round3's circumstances.
2. Aside from sound, light may be a good add-on to lead the users, especially in dark areas.
3. The application should show the distance between the user and the beeper to help them find medication more quickly.
For the style design part, I chose two different schemes for the app. One emphasizes cleanness and simplicity, which will provide intuitive information to the user. The other is more colorful and energetic, aiming to ease people's fear of taking medication. After some user testing and discussion, I decided to go with the first scheme.
"I like how you go beyond an application and consider utilizing hardware in this system. Also, the interface seems clean and clear to me."
