What should a patient do when their medication doesn't feel like it's working? With cold medicine, it may seem negligible. But what about heart medicine? Antidepressants? A bad batch of medication can be very dangerous and the pharmaceutical industry lacks a process for ensuring patients receive quality medication. With 80% of drug ingredients from China or India, 3 drug recalls per day, and 100 recalls per year with risk of death, bad batches of medication are a real yet difficult to detect problem. Valisure is a pharmacy dedicated to providing tested and functioning medication and educating the general population on the importance of quality-checked medication.

Educating the population on the frequency and dangers of bad medication was Valisure's primary challenge. Most people have no idea that their medication isn't working until symptoms hit them. Valisire aims to show users the value and impact of quality-checked medication.

To get a sense of what the modern online pharmacy looked like and how best to approach Valisure's mission, we looked to our competitors Walgreens and CVS, as well as rising online pharmacies such as Capsule and Pillpack. To explore these services, we created accounts, provided insurance and necessary information, and transferred a prescription for the full experience. In addition, we worked with Valisure’s own pharmacist Paul to identify the typical flow of how he would manually register a user or accept a prescription transfer from a new patient.

One noteworthy factor in our competitors' processes was that much of the information on medication was obscured unless you actually made an account and transferred a prescription. In Pillpack and Capsule, for example, you could not even view available medications or explore the pharmacy without registering and providing insurance information. Valisure did not want to take this approach as we wanted to create transparency with users.

To maintain transparency with users, Valisure only asks for a small amount of information to be filled out to create an account and access all products on the site. The registration flow then leads to a 2nd screen where users are prompted to input insurance details and anything needed for prescriptions. However, users are given the option to finish this information later if they choose. They ar later prompted again at checkout when attempting to add an Rx product to their cart.

There’s nothing bright or exciting about medication. White and blue capsules in tiny white bottles are often a last resort for people and an object of stress and anxiety. For Valisure’s branding, we built a set of elements to portray medication as a hope rather than a necessity. The goal was not to be just another corporate pharmacy, but a friendly and trusted source of service, information, and value. The new brand elements include rounded circle and oval pill shapes, the roundness representing unity and community. As well as a bright orange highlight color to present a friendly and empathetic vibe. Similarly, with the iconography, we carried through a theme of circularity with round elements, rounded corners to lines, and large, simple shapes.

An element we agreed worked well for our competitor Capsule, was the language used in presenting a virtual pharmacist named Sonia. This automated bot would greet you, ask you what you needed, and sign off on emails in a friendly tone. To incorporate a similar “We’re here for you” feeling into Valisure’s process, we opted for a simple dashboard. When the user signs in, they are greeted by name and asked what they would like to be helped with. Then, the friendly brand icons are used to provide a small set of options from OTC shop products to prescriptions. And below, all recent order information is available to users, so they can always get an overview of their upcoming medications.

Shopping for medication doesn’t need to feel like the chore that it is. We opted for a simple an familiar e-commerce layout here to give users the sense that their products and medications are just a click or tap away. Other pharmacies, we found, would often obscure this process. While OTC products were easy to review and purchase at a glance, prescription medications were shrouded in separate site categories and layers of “Give us your insurance and we’ll let you know if we maybe have this medication and what it maybe will cost with your copay”. Valisure aims to create more transparency and simplicity in this process.

While they couldn't share a flat price for a prescription medication without insurance information, they could provide the premium price as well as the average copay. They could also ensure that prescription medication information was available through a drug catalog. This way, users could educate themselves on any medication they sought, even prior to getting a prescription. We chose to provide a flow that did not create a top secret backdoor portal to prescription medication information because there was no need to hide it. A prescription is always checked and insurance is always verified by a pharmacist at the end of the process.

The checkout process needed to maintain the elements of simplicity and trust portrayed throughout the brand, while ensuring that all necessary information was acquired, especially for prescription items. This meant that a user who had previously skipped the “Tell us about you” section upon registration would be prompted to fill out their insurance information.

Once an order had been placed, it was important for Valisure to keep users informed on where their medication was or whether they needed to provide any additional information to a pharmacist. To do this, we created a small step-by-step model to show users what they could expect next. Like food delivery apps which keep you informed from order creation to delivery, Valisure aims to keep users in the loop wherever their orders are.

Once an order is placed, it is accessible under Recent Orders on the user’s homepage and under Order History on the account page. The user’s account section is structured with a simple single row format of information for easy readability.

Valisure promotes free information by allowing users to peruse prescription products freely without having to provide insurance information. To some pharmacies, this may seem a waste. Why view a product that you don’t have a prescription for? Your doctor is the one who tells you what to need. You don’t need to read about it. However, Valisure aims to provide transparency with an available inventory of all prescription medications available. While Valisure is constantly expanding its medication breadth based on user needs, they are upfront with providing as much information as possible about medications that they do batch test. This way, there is no second layer between the user and the pharmacy, preventing users from learning more about what they need, what is affordable, and what they can request, without getting in touch with a pharmacist.