Why i heart ClearRx

I’ve known about the story of Deborah Adler and the design of the ClearRx pill bottle for a couple of years. In my mind, it was another design feel-good story that didn’t have much in common with my everyday design work. But that changed a few months ago when I happened across a BusinessWeek podcast of Deborah talking to one of her past professors Brian Collins.

The passion and perseverance of the ClearRx story kept my attention, but it’s the way it changed Target’s pharmacy strategy from the outside in that really got me excited. Since then, I’ve blogged about it, I’ve included the story in many of my public presentations, and I interviewed Deborah as a lead-up to her presentation atUXWeek. What gets me so excited is that Deborah understood that the healthcare system wasn’t meeting basic needs of people who relied on it (SAFETY!), and so she designed and prototyped an obviously better solution that anyone could look at and appreciate.

And that’s exactly what Target did. Seeing the promise of the design, they bought the patent from Deborah and redesigned their IT, printing/labeling, training, and marketing around the vision of the new pill bottle. Deborah showed how things should be, creating a picture of how target could be play a more meaningful role in the lives of their customers. Target built backwards from that vision, reorganizing their capabilities. Target immediately increased their pharmacy customer base, and had something truly valuable to offer their customers rather than hard-to-keep promises of nicer service.

The ClearRx story exemplifies experience strategy — working from the experiences with the user back through the organizational systems that support it, to create something useful, human, and valuable. Thanks Deborah for keeping me inspired!