Implementing a web extension inline with Pill Clubs brand pillars, to differentiate them from their competitors, while solving the prevalent customer issue of finding the best oral contraception for them.

THE COMPANY

Pill Club

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 those using contraception through access, choice and education.

Understanding the brand

Before finding any business problems to solve, we wanted to understand Pill Club's identity. Auditing their brand, we looked into their mission statement, values, and golden circle, synthesizing this research into five brand pillars.

BUSINESS PROBLEM

Brand & Value Gap

Auditing the Pill Club site, we found very few resources in line with these pillars, such as helping individuals understand what they are taking, and how it will affect their body. Instead, Pill Club is prioritizing the explanation of their service, over the explanation of birth control pills and their effects.

Parsing through reviews of the company online, we found that Pill Clubs customers are being prescribed Pills with both negative and positive effects, that the customers were unaware of. Left too long, this could have negative effects on the company.

OPPORTUNITY

Differentiation

To understand if this was actually an issue that presented any opportunities, our team conducted primary and secondary research, finding out these two key issues to help frame our direction:

1. 40% of women have little formal education on oral contraception
   

2. Through conducting a SWOT analysis, we found that Pill Clubs primary competitors (Nurx, Hers) main weakness is that they have little educational resources online

This is an industry-wide issue could allow Pill Club to differentiate by catering to the audience that needs information on birth control pills to find a product that works for them. Shifting the perception of Pill Club as the go-to for individuals new to birth control pills.

Framing

How might we provide potential users of birth control pills with necessary information to confidently submit a prescription request with Pill Club?

Guiding Principles

Through understanding the brand pillars, we created these guiding principles to refer to when making decisions, ensuring that we were remaining in alignment with Pill Clubs promise to their customers.

1. How might we ensure that Pill Club is prescribing the most suitable birth control pills while allowing the final decision to remain in the customers hand.
   

2. How might we provide enough information to help customers make informed decisions, without compromising cognitive overload.

3. How might we ensure customers feel connected to and cared for by a company they have no physical interaction with?

Reality Check

Expert Interview

As this is a project in the healthcare industry, we wanted to understand what we could and couldn’t do as designers. After we brainstormed a few directions, we interviewed an expert on any limitations we might face. This interview subsequently helped us start to define our brand voice by understanding what to say, and how to say it.

PERSONA

Designing for newcomers

To ensure we were designing for real users, we identified the key needs and characteristics of our target audience (potential customers new to birth control pills) surveying 90+ participants matching the description, having a follow up interview with 5 of them, and conducting secondary research on the oral contraception subscription service target market. With this information, we put together the following persona to create a more realistic analysis of the customers current state scenario for Pill Clubs website.

Insights

Additionally, we found these three key insights to help guide our process:

1. When seeking information on the pill and how it works, customers tend to look into the experiences of others, and consider experts’ opinions
   

2. 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

3. Being informed on the impact birth control pills have on one’s body and their additional beneficial uses (reduced acne, etc) affects the customer’s perceived value of the pill.

FRAMEWORK

Finding where to intervene

By mapping out the current experience of a Pill Club customer, we discovered that the problems faced by our audience lie within the awareness stage (customers finding contradicting information online) and the consideration stage (when the customer is actually on the Pill Club site).

Since we are unable to intervene before they are on the site, such as when they are doing their own research in the awareness stage, we focused on the consideration stage, an area we could tackle.

SOLUTION

Website Extension

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.

This solution was made possible through an iterative process of future state scenarios for the revised IA, wire-framing, and 3 rounds of user testing with subjects from the target group.

BRANDING

Brand Voice

By running my team through a brand exercise, such as finding the brand archetype, keywords to describe the brand, and combining it with the tips from our expert interview, we created our brand voice. This guideline helped us in writing the copy, but also helped us in our UI design decisions as well as our design system.
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One interesting finding was that the suggestions from the expert, and our brand, are both quite in alignment with one another.

Design System

With our branding exercise in mind, we took the keywords generated, to guide our art direction. Starting with the moodboard, then designing the system with this in mind. The branding exercise helped keep our visual design, content strategy, interaction design all in alignment with another, all reaching the same goal and spreading the same message about the company. However, through the use of similar colour, typefaces, and iconography we kept brand equity, lifting the visuals to match the Brand DNA, without completely overhauling it.

REFLECTION

The Results

Taking one of the most important classes (IAT 438) of my degree online initially posed worries about getting the most out of the class. However, this was made easier by using tools such as Figma for design collaboration, and Notion for planning, and Discord (with its music listening features) for discussion. Additionally, having elements of our project such as the copywriting and attention to UI as it pertains to our persona commended by the teaching staff, we feel comfortable as a team this project could be implemented into the current site.

Internal Critiques

Scheduling internal critiques before the final crit helped us stay on the same page, getting a fresh perspective from someone still immersed in the project, allowed one to take their eyes off their own work, ensured quality assurance before handing it in, and overall improved team communication immensely. In the end, this created a more cohesive product, and helped everyone feel heard without feeling they were giving unsolicited feedback.

Atmosphere and Ego

Creating an atmosphere where being wrong is ok, not only helps encourage more creative ideas while brainstorming, but means that if another's idea is stronger than your own, to go with theirs without feeling shameful. Equally, this makes internal critiques much easier. This shifts the project from being designer centered, to client centered. This can only happen if the group is comfortable with vulnerability, something our team embraced.