Pill reminder
More than half of UK residents over 65 are taking three different prescribed medications during any given week (NHS Digital, 2014). Many patients come up with creative ways to remember to take the right medicine at the right time. And they still forget.
My role
This was my first interaction design project as a part of my MSc in Human-computer interaction Design. I worked as a team with three other students. We were supported by our tutor during tutorial sessions and had specific tasks to carry out.
The challenge
Older people use a number of aids to remember to take their medicines – one of which is the dosette box. We were tasked with following a user-centred design process and producing a detailed design for a “digital dosette box”.
Discovery
Interviews
Within the team we had little exposure to dosette boxes and how people used them. We decided to follow a semi-structured interview approach as we wanted to be able to find out more about unexpected user behaviour – if it emerged during the course of the interview. We developed a set of warm-up questions to start followed by a series of questions to find out more about participants’ medicines regime and how and if they used a dosette box.
Analysis
Data coding
Our team was given excerpts from existing research into medicine management amongst older people. We went through the observations and used Trello to code the data using categories that emerged as we went through the research artefacts.
A persona
Analysing the data we discovered:
- Patients needed to know which medicine to take when. We counted eight different tactics for remembering.
- Getting medicines out of blister packs, bottles and dosette boxes is an issue for many.
- Patients need to take medicines with them when they go out.
- Patients take many medicines over the counter in addition to their prescription medicines.
Hierarchical task analysis
Drafting HTAs of Hierarchical Task Analysis helped us understand the tasks people currently carry out in taking their medicines. We created two HTAs: one for accessing medicines and one for remembering to take medicines.
Existing user journey
We then sketched user journeys based on research data. The user journeys helped us consider and communicate the users’ context.
Requirements
Using the Volere requirements framework and the provided research data we created a set of requirements for our digital dosette box.
Design
Next we came up with some conceptual designs, which we sketched out.
