Everyday UI: Prescription Bottles
Rx Pharmacy once did a case study on the usability of their prescription bottles. In one instance, they asked an elderly women if they could observe how she opened the bottle. They watched in horror as she proceeded to cut the bottle open with a deli slicer. She told the researchers that she had been opening the bottle that way for 20 years.
How to open a prescription bottle is not obvious to everyone. In fact, many struggle with the cap for several moments before overcoming the push and turn design. More importantly, users can make mistakes when reading the labels on bottles that can lead to dangerous situations. For example, people accidentally take their spouses medicine, they take the wrong dosage, or they don’t realize the prescription is past the expiration date.
One of the bad characteristics of the bottle’s design is how poorly information is presented to the user. The different crucial pieces of information: name of the person, instructions, and name of drug are not distinct from each other or prioritized accordingly. For example, the name of the drug, is sometimes placed below the instructions and lacks visual contrast needed to attract the users’ attention. Also, with the slim cylinder design of the current bottle, longer pieces of information wrap around the bottle and users’ have to rotate the bottle to get around this. As a result, it can take a while for users to process the information or pick up on key details about their prescription, resulting in low learnability. In addition, even frequent users can mistake one prescription bottle for another or take the incorrect dose if they are balancing multiple prescriptions meaning the efficiency of the current design is quite low.
Another bad characteristic about the bottle is that some designs contain warning stickers along the vertical axis rather than the horizontal axis of the bottle like the rest of the information. Therefore, users have to read along both directions in order to get all the crucial information. This can be confusing for elderly people who might not see the extra information, or think it’s not important since its not part of the main horizontal text. In addition, it’s easy to miss for new users who aren’t used to reading prescription bottles. As a whole, the it’s not efficient for users to have to read the bottle from two directions and the low learnability of this information design can cause a new user to make a mistake.
Besides the information on the bottle, the cap can also be struggle for many users’. The child safe cap can be a struggle at first, as the instructions on the top to push down and turn can new users time to process, resulting in slow learnability. However, memorability is pretty good, because once users figure out how to open the cap, there is a good chance that they will remember and complete the task faster the next time. One “hack” that most people don’t know about is that you can turn the lid of the bottle upside down to transform it into a pop off lid, rather than a child-resistant one. However, unlike the push and turn there is no instructions to use the cap this way and there are no affordances made into the design that guide users to this conclusion. So this clever design which allows for both pop off and child-resistant lock goes missed by new and long time users alike.
I would redesign the packaging so that it is a slide out box. The pull tab is more senior and elderly friendly, increasing learnability for new users. Also, the tab is an affordance because users are used to pulling tabs from folders and in notes. computer screens, In addition, the push in tabs give the user the option to lock the box more securely. If they don’t use the tabs, there is enough resistance between the slide out box and the outer one that it won’t slide out if a child turned it over.
Finally, on the bottom of the box would be information about refills, since this information would reveal itself once the box is empty.
With the new rectangular shape, information can be presented on a flat surface. In the new design, difference pieces of information are visually distinct from each other in factors including background color, all caps, and white space, increasing the efficiency of the long-term users reading the information. Also, drug name, instructions and expiration date are prioritized over the brand name and quantity. Finally, the new packaging will be made from paper board with a protectant coating. The paper material will allow producers to personalize their customer’s boxes with their names, decreasing the likelihood that users will take another person’s prescription.
