PROJECT

Drugs: Adding User Reviews

SKILLS USED
Interaction Design
Quantitative Test (survey)
Qualitative test (in-person study)
Prototyping (InVision)

PROBLEM
Healthline, like its competitors Drugs.com and WedMD, provides clinical drug information (i.e. info about pharmaceutical and over-the-counter drugs). One feature the site was lacking is the ability for users to read or write reviews from other users about a drug.

User reviews for drugs is not as straightforward as a 5-star rating system like Amazon reviews. To create a meaningful review, additional context is needed, such as user's age, gender, how effective it was at resolving symptoms, how many side effects were experienced, etc.

FINAL MOCKS
Below are the final mocks showing two breakpoints - mobile and desktop.

PROCESS
Initially I did competitive analysis of other websites with drug reviews.  I also performed quantitative research, which involved visitors of Healthline.com filling out a survey of what they found valuable in drug reviews by their peers.

During this process, I considered questions such as:

• Should drug reviews be presented on the same URL, or separate (since the page already contains a lot of information)?
• How much input should be required for a review (effectiveness, ease of use, side effects, age, gender?)
• Should we ask for a name?
• Should we use a 5-star rating system? 

Pharmaceutical drugs effectiveness and side effects vary widely based on age, gender, and medical condition (as drugs can be used to treat various conditions). A review must have enough information to make it useful.

Next, I directly created high-fidelity prototypes in Invision.

• Desktop prototype: shows the overall feature set of navigating to the reviews page, adding a new review, and editing/deleting a review.
• Mobile protoype: This prototype is three screens, to demonstrate how the user can access the reviews section

We then recruited three people for an in-person usability study. I moderated the sessions while my project team observed in another room.

In addition to refinements, the usability study provided insights to how consumers think of drug reviews.

You can explore my design process further in the video walkthrough below.