I saw this today in Walgreens’ pharmacy section – a magnifying lens to help customers read text on drug packaging. It was right by products aimed at elderly people, so fading eyesight would definitely be an issue.
Helpful, right? Yes and no.
On one hand, this tool magnifies the problem of designs which squash instructions together in hard to read text. On the other hand, it helps the minority of people who literally cannot read the packaging but otherwise doesn’t get in the way. It’s not obvious whether this is satisfactory. How clearly does packaging need to be designed? What is the tradeoff between information and marketing?
Is it enough to help the user deal with a design problem, or should you attack the problem directly?
One company to have gone a step further is Target, which adopted the thesis project of a designer called Deborah Adler. According to her research, 60% of Americans don’t take their medication correctly, and she decided to do something about it when the same error put her grandmother in hospital.
Here is her design, which addressed the problems of the standard brown plastic tubes we’ve all come to know and, well, know. The main issues: inconsistent labeling, brand names taking priority over drug names, confusing numbers, poor color combinations, hard to read curved shape and tiny type. The redesign is covered in detail on the New York Magazine website.
It takes much more effort and money to make something like this work, and not just in designing the nicer package. Brandon Schauer at Adaptive Path points out that the bottle must be supported by an entire system to be effective:
“I’m guessing that it’s not just the design patents that have kept other pharmacies from mimicking the Target pill bottle. The pill bottle isn’t just a new SKU in a retail environment or just a piece of packaging that can be swapped out for the old design. The bottle is just the visible tip of a much deeper system of drug delivery that would take significant time and investment to emulate.
Reframing
In my last post, I said that designers have the responsibility to make the most of each design opportunity. These two stories highlight the difficulty of doing so due to the variety of choices faced by any company or individual whose actions will impact those using its/his/her products. How far should you go to make things more usable? Whose responsibility is it? How much money should you spend on improving usability?
All this comes down to the fundamental question: what problem are we here to fix? Deborah Adler chose a much broader framing (“Making sure that people take the right drugs at the right time”) than Walgreens (“Helping some people to read the packaging”). Balancing the frame of action against the resources available is one of the most important tasks of a designer. Tricky.
So, did Walgreens go far enough? Did Target go far enough?
What do you think?
