Generic Drug Evaluation: Design Implications
Role: UX RESEARCHER
User Observation | Affinity Diagramming | Interviews | Personas | Remote surveys
For this project I worked with a team of 4 to uncover insights for the design of a technology-based solution intended to help consumers evaluate the safety of generic drugs. Our goal was to determine what level of understanding consumers had of generic drug safety and how we could best provide them with more understandable and accessible safety information. Through a series of observations, interviews, and remote surveys that were designed and conducted over 10 weeks, we gathered enough data to inform a set of design implications for a potential website.
During this time our team worked on protocol creation, recruitment, interviewing, observation, data analysis, and the creation of models to display our findings.
Observation
We started by observing 8 participants as they completed task-based scenarios that consisted of asking them to search for generic substitutes for brand name medications. Each of us recruited two participants for observation, observed their behaviors, and took notes on their performance using an AEIOU (Actions, Environment, Interactions, Observations, Users) framework. We consolidated our findings and I created a user flow diagram outlining the most common ways users were getting information about the safety of generic drugs.
What we found:
Trustworthiness and reliability are primary concerns for users trying to find information. Not even government websites were exempt from their skepticism. Opinions ranged from doubting the credibility of sources to assuming sites were being deliberately dishonest or evasive with safety and cost information.
Participants felt the depth of information available to them online was not enough. The sources users were willing to consult were limited, and one participant even expressed that they felt they could only get truly comprehensive information from their doctor.
Even when information was available it was simply too confusing. From drug names to insurance coverage, even available information was jargony or irrelevant for the tasks.
We discovered that certain users never made use of online tools or searched on their own, opting instead to talk to a medical professional directly or to take a generic medication directly without considering it’s safety at all. Those who did search for information on their own found it difficult to sort through sources and decide which ones were trustworthy.
Interviews
Following the observation phase, we interviewed eight new people who’d taken generic drugs before. The interview questions focused on their motivations and behaviors when deciding to take generic drugs. We recorded the interviews, transcribed them, and coded each interview individually in Atlas.ti. After combining codes, we assessed the data and defined common themes, forming user profiles to represent the combined data gathered in the observations and interviews.
We created user profiles to provide condensed representations of the data we gathered that could be refined by additional data we found along the way. While there is no real substitute for concrete data, we included only the most relevant information that would inform our design implications going forward and easily identify the core concerns of our users.
Surveys
The final stage of our research was to conduct remote surveys. The survey questions evaluated how users search for and prioritize information about generic medications, as well how they assessed the safety of both prescribed and over-the-counter drugs.
After running the survey in Qualtrics, we analyzed 33 responses in SPSS using Mann-Whitley tests to analyze the following four hypotheses:
Uninsured people rank cost as a higher priority than insured ones when searching for information about generic drug safety - There was no significant difference in the importance of cost between insured and uninsured participants
Users who have not taken a prescription generic medication prioritize cost less than those who have - There was no significant difference in the importance of cost between people who were prescribed generic medications as compared to people who hadn’t.
Users that check to see if over-the-counter and prescription generic drugs are safe before taking them are more likely to consult a medical professional than those that do not - There was no significant difference between the self-reported frequency of consulting a doctor between those who checked for the safety of either over-the-counter or prescribed drugs and those that did not.
People taking multiple medications will rank drug interactions higher priority for necessary information than people taking one or none - There was no significant difference in the self-reported importance ratings of drug interactions between both groups.
Ultimately, the data we gathered suggested that the groups compared had consistent priorities, and so we created a feature matrix of solutions all our users needed.
Of our features, the highest priority were:
A comprehensive database of medications which can be searched by drug name, company, or cost.
A price comparison tool that shows price comparisons of generic vs brand name, as well as price comparison for locations where consumers can obtain the drug
A drug interaction comparison feature
Rating and review feature for consumers to share their experiences and opinions of generic medications
Side effects comparison tables
Live chat feature for medical professional support
Drug effectiveness ratings by medical professionals
Finally, we used simple journey maps coupled with our user personas to demonstrate how and why they might interact with potential features.
Takeaways
In the future we would aim to gather more closely matching sample sizes to compare in future studies and use additional time to gather larger samples to ensure that we can reproduce our findings. In spite of this we were able to take the data gathered to build the concept with the collective input of observation, interviewing and surveying during the product discovery stage. Future work would also include additional research using prototypes informed by our design implications to see how well our insights meet the need of generic drug users who need clearer, more comprehensive safety information.