Pill Club
At a glance
Shifting the perception of an online birth control company to the go-to for newcomers
Context
8-week student project
My role
Art director
UI designer
UX designer
Visual designer
Team
Jonathan Reade
Bella Wang
Kesha Omarali
Patrick Pacunana
Background
Pill Club is an online, direct-to-consumer birth control prescription and delivery service. Backed by a team of health professionals, the company functions on its own as a pharmacy, helping customers across the United States easily get affordable birth control. Their mission is to be a trusted healthcare professional for women through access, choice and education.
To give us a better idea of Pill Club's identity, we looked in-depth into their mission statement and values, and synthesized this research into five brand pillars: providing 'personalized prescriptions', creating a 'trusted space', 'prioritizing understanding', enabling 'empowered decision making' and maintaining a 'reassuring experience'.
Business problem
To figure out where we would intervene, we needed to find a business problem. Unfortunately, testing the entirety of Pill Club's service involved purchasing a prescription and having an American address, meaning we could not test it for ourselves. Instead, we turned to customer reviews to uncover problem areas.
We were also fortunate to have access to a medical professional (not part of Pill Club) who was willing to provide us with helpful constraints and advice, and some 'reality checks' along the way. By cross-referencing these expert insights with our secondary research, we narrowed them down to two points that we could really focus on within the scope of the project.
● Navigating the industry
Research on Pill Club's competition (i.e. Hers and Nurx) revealed that some of their problems are, in fact, industry-wide. From the data gathered, we were able to conclude that none of these companies provide enough support for newcomers in the form of educational content. This insight helped inform our competitive analysis matrix and decision to give Pill Club an advantage by catering to the audience; subsequently allowing them to truly embody their brand pillars of 'prioritizing understanding' and 'empowered decision making' even more.
Reframing the problem
With the business problem and opportunity established, had to ask ourselves: How might we provide potential users of birth control pills with the necessary information to confidently submit a prescription request with Pill Club?
To guide us through this problem, we had a set of principles that we referred to continuously throughout our iteration process. These would be used to measure how well our intervention is staying in line with Pill Club's values and pillars.
Understanding the audience
With a direction established, the next step was to identify the key needs and characteristics of our target audience (potential customers new to birth control pills) which we did through 90+ anonymous surveys and 5 follow-up interviews. There were three insights gathered from this research, that were key in informing our persona:
Social Influence
When seeking information on the pill and how it works, customers tend to look into the experiences of others, and consider experts’ opinions
Personal Research
Those who have knowledge of oral contraception will compare brand options that are suitable for their needs, those who don’t may rely on the doctor to prescribe
Holistic Debrief
Being informed on the impact birth control pills have on one’s body and their additional uses affects the customer’s perceived value of the pill.
● User Journey
By mapping out the current experience of a Pill Club customer, we discovered that the problems faced by our audience lie within the awareness and consideration stages, as customers explore the site and form an understanding of both Pill Club and oral contraception. With this in mind, we moved forward on creating a solution, we knew where to focus.
Putting it all together
Pill Club Resources is an enhancement of the company's digital presence in order to help them appeal to customers new to oral contraception. It consists of three sections, Learn, Brands and Pill Pals.
LEARN ABOUT BIRTH
CONTROL PILLS
This page addresses the initial questions potential customers may have in one centralized location. Sectioned and expandable information helps present it in a digestible manner, as not to overwhelm them.
BROWSE AND COMPARE
BRANDS
To help potential customers make informed choices, brand prices, alternatives, and medical precautions are outlined.
FIND THE BEST PILL
FOR YOU
When it comes to taking birth control pills, the effect on one’s lifestyle, and mental and physical wellbeing, are important to consider. Pill Pals provides stories by individuals similar to customers in an effort to help them find a suitable brand.
● Added value
Pill Club Resources gives the company a distinct advantage over others in the telecontraception industry by bringing customers confidence in their decision to choose Pill Club. In turn, with this intervention, the company would be able to expand its customer base to individuals like Vanessa from our persona.
Design System
For our intervention, we chose to iterate Pill Club's branding just enough to make it feel new, without throwing out what they already had. By considering the large amount of information needed from the start, we were able to maintain a sense of hospitality and calmness with the art direction we adopted. To make sure that our new branding was solid, we took the extra step to create a brand voice chart based on Pill Club's pillars once again, and a medical UX writing guide.
My Role
While I was involved in the research process for this project, when it came to execution, my primary role was within art direction and UI design. I was responsible for taking the brand voice outlined by the content team, and translating that into the art direction and design of the interface – which really challenged my information architecture skills. I was also responsible for designing out final presentation slides.
Reflection
Working on this project was quite the journey. It was my first long-term collaboration project that was purely online. Despite this, the eight weeks that this project took challenged me to develop my skills into the areas of UX design beyond visuals. I learned a lot about design methods and frameworks, and a lot about my interests, strengths and weaknesses within the field. Special thanks to the teaching staff for the semester, my teammates, and Discord (which let us listen to music together for our hours-long meetings.
Check out our final presentation slide deck here.