Making your mark through user experience
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Navigation, People, Applications, Web browser, Microsoft on
Good design isn’t just for those fancy marketing advertising sites. It’s an important part of how you relate to your users – and how they work with your applications and services. A SAP line of business service needs just as much design as an ecommerce web site. Internal users need to love the applications they use just as much as they love eBay or LiveJournal or IT Pro…
Here at MIX09 Microsoft is evangelising user experience to designers and developers from all over the world. Microsoft Research’s Bill Buxton has provided dynamic and entertaining keynotes, and his ideas are showing up in the next generation of design tools that previewed here in Las Vegas this week. But the most interesting and inspiring keynote wasn’t the Silverlight 3 extravaganza, or the unveiling of Internet Explorer 8. Instead it was one woman standing on stage talking about prescription medicines.
I was tempted to save this story for Ada Lovelace Day next week, but Deborah Adler’s work with redesigning the prescription label shows just how good design can make people’s lives easier (and even save them), while also changing the public’s perception of a business.
It all started when her grandmother accidentally took some of her grandfather’s medicine. It’s not difficult for that to happen, as the standard packaging for pharmacy medicines all look the same: little orange plastic jars with badly printed labels. Adler was working on her master’s design thesis at the time, and took on redesigning the packaging as a task.
She used information architecture principles to redesign the labels, and came up with a packaging design that made it easier to view important information. The result was a clearer, safer view that could be personalized to avoid confusion, and which prioritised key pieces of information – the drug, the dose, and when it should be taken.
Of course that was just a college project, but Adler believed in what she was doing and felt that things should go a lot further than just being shelved in a college library. She took her ideas to regulatory bodies and to many of the large US pharmacy chains.
She ended up working with Target, where her ideas were refined, using more user research and industrial design. The resulting Clear RX system had redesigned packaging, with Adler’s new clear labels, as well as a new set of documentation to go along with the pill bottles – and the bottle included a magnifying lens to make the text even clearer.
Clear RX has now won many awards, and has also changed the perception of Target’s pharmacy – significantly increasing its market share. A new user experience has ended up not only saving lives, but adding business value.
Adler’s rules for design are a good set of guidelines for anyone designing an application, or a service:
1.Having a love affair with the customer and digging into their needs
2.Solve those needs humanly and humanely
Having a love affair with your users may seem a little odd, but it’s all about making a connection to your users and understanding what they need and how they need it.
Simon
At MIX09 in Las Vegas
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