• Introducing Deborah, Bill Buxton says, “she doesn’t come from our culture. To her, a developer is someone who turns your photos into prints!” Deborah Adler was behind the redesign of Target’s ClearRx drug prescription packaging, which has had a big impact in avoiding drug prescription misusage.

0939 When you wipe away the high-tech jargon, we’re all in the business of creating an experience for a customer. When you make it a comfortable or enjoyable one, your job is done!

0940 In redesigning the Target packaging, I started with my grandmother. She accidentally took her husband’s prescription. When I looked into it, I could see why – they both were prescribed the same drug at different strengths, and since their names were similar, there was very little to notice different about the two packages.

60% of Americans don’t take their medications correctly. The number of prescriptions filled in the US each years equals more than 10 per person. With 300 million citizens, that represents 3 billion drug prescriptions. We spend a huge amount of money dealing with the issues of incorrect drug usage, and the costs are measured in lives.

0944 Deborah is highlighting some of the design issues that plague drug packaging – poorly printed text with bad iconography, large quantities of small print text with poor formatting and long line length, complex text (“do not take with nitrates” is only meaningful if you know what a nitrate is).

0946 There’s no hierarchy of information – how do you know what is relevant and what is just manufacturing information? In redesigning the packaging, the goal was to combine information architecture with intuition and previous knowledge of cognitive schemas (knowledge of what the most important pieces of information are). I used color coding so that no two people in the same household have the same color bottle. I wanted people at a glance to know who it was for, what the drug was, and when to take it. I even included a magnifying lens in the back of the bottle so that people who couldn’t read small type had a way to look at it.

0951 We’re now looking at chemicals that change color over time, so that when a drug expires, a big cross appears over the label.

0952 When I completed my thesis, I went to Target to see whether they would adopt it. Target has a “design for all” philosophy, and they took the idea under their wings and refined it into the ClearRx system, which is now standard for all Target prescriptions.

0957 Lots of real-world challenges that we had to address in productizing this: for example, there are 23 variations that had to be addressed due to state law differences. We had to retool the production system too, for example with duplex printing. When Richard Carmona, the former US Surgeon General reviewed this, he said, “the new design is a simple yet important step in improving the health literacy of all Americans.” New York Magazine first broke the story about the ClearRx system – it was great to hear the story presented both from the designer’s perspective and the end-users’ perspective.

1005 Let me give you the life-long lessons I learned from this project. What separates you from your competitors isn’t design or development, it’s truly thinking about the person who will use your design or development and figuring out how it can solve their needs. Once you start thinking about your customers’ needs, it becomes a habit. When you start from this perspective, you’re no longer just a designer, you’re a user experience designer, and I salute you for this!

• And we’re done! Don’t forget to check out the other sessions at http://live.visitmix.com, including Giorgio Sardo’s “lap around IE8”. I’ll be continuing to live blog through the conference, so keep an eye on http://visitmix.com/Opinions and http://blogs.msdn.com/tims for more!