👋
Hi, I am Le Cuong and I am a Business Product Manager and UX Designer from Vietnam.
You’re reading my response to a UX design challenge.
Why did I do this challenge?
I was studying the Google UX course on Coursera during the Covid-19 lockdown of Ho Chi Minh City, and while exploring how others approach their UX design challenges, whiteboard section interviews, and other such things, I decided to do a few case studies and challenges to hone my knowledge. Indeed, after completing the activities, I learned a lot and was able to identify the skills I missed so that I could add them to my learning to-do list.
Ok, without further ado, let’s start.
What is the challenge?
Scenario:
You’ve just started as a product manager for a new service that a well-known delivery company (LeNow) wants to launch: drug deliveries. The business team saw a huge opportunity in allowing people to get medicine delivered to their homes through LeNow, which has already delivered food, packages, and other items.
Note: The exercise’s goal is to create a well-thought-out product framework for the pharmacy-side interface. If you must make assumptions in order to proceed, please say them clearly.
Role: Product Manager.
Type: UX design Take-home challenge.
Assumption statements:
Because the purpose of this project is to demonstrate the UX design process and framework, I skipped all other steps and made assumptions, to begin with. Here are my assumptions:
- Existed functionalities for chat, delivery tracking, and merchant wallet from LeNow. As a result, our new service will make utilize of them.
- This feature’s business feasibilities are backed up completely by the business team (as mentioned in the exercise’s statement) so as a PM I just need to take care from there to have it build.
- All the assumptions in the “How often a person buys medicine?” section are correct results after interviewing 100 active users of LeNow (random distribution). Reference: Figure 1
- All the assumptions are in the Why section below. Reference: Figure 2
- The task of functionalities prioritization had been done with the presence of the business and engineering team.
- The scope of this product exercise is only a design solution for the pharmacy side.
- Our legal team has successfully got all permission and documentation for delivering prescribed drugs to customers.
How often does a person buy medicine?
Under what circumstances?
Product Framework
The framework I am using would be needed to answer these questions (more detail in figure 2 below):
- Why are we building it?
- Who are we building it for?
- Where and when it will be used?
- What are we building?
- How could we measure it?
Questions & Answers:
1. From your perspective, what are the functionalities needed for the partner pharmacies?
- Setup my pharmacy
- Pharmacy detail page
- Balance
- Update Bank account
- Withdrawn to a bank account
- Product SKU management
- Update product detail
- Create pre-defined prescription
- Get orders
- Order list
- Order detail page
- View customer information
- Confirm order
- Delivery status
- Order detail page
- Prescription list
- create/update prescription
- Chat/consult customers
- Order list
- Print receipt for order packing
- Get paid
- Merchant wallet – reuse from GetNow merchant
- Check balance
- Income dashboard
- Withdraw money
- Wallet statement history
- Merchant wallet – reuse from GetNow merchant
2. How would you prioritize these functionalities? Please explain prioritization criteria.
I would use the value vs effort framework of prioritization because:
- It is simple to understand and practice
- Good for a small team where resources are limited
- It is flexible to be agreed upon by team members on what makes of value and effort
3 main task a pharmacy-side user focus on and any functionalities that directly affect the outcome of these tasks will have the highest score of value.
- Get orders – There
- Ship order – Could reuse from GetNow merchant (as per stated assumption) however, there might be some little enhancement to make it work with pharmacy businesses.
- Get paid – Could from GetNow merchant (as per stated assumption) however, there might be some little enhancement to make it work with pharmacy businesses.
We will use the order number (from 1-12) in the above table for reference for organizing the tickets ordered in the backlog. However, the final order of tickets will still depend on the decision of the team in the Grooming and planning meeting.
3. What risks to the success of the application can you identify? How would you mitigate these risks?
Below are risks that associate with product development till the market stage and improvement.
Product risk
- Resources (people, skills, technology, and budget) to deliver the product on time. What to do: Need to involve a project manager on the team to evaluate the scope, resources, and team members for this product should be dedicated.
- Not enough data to run alpha and beta testing What to do: Need to have plans for recruiting a number of initial pharmacies and customers (with agreement) for alpha and beta testing.
- User experience risk caused by poor usability What to do: Same as number 2 above and make sure to involve UX/UI designers (should be the one in charge for usability testing) in the process.
- Quality risks: Requirements, non-functional requirements, design, testing, or quality control What to do: Need to list all possible risks out with QC and Engineer team and come up with multiple backup plans for the majority of possible issues.
- Late launch due to unexpected defects or incidents What to do: Need to have a plan to deal with such incidents like notifying the press, media, and partners of the lateness beforehand by discussing with all related departments at an early stage of the product.
Market risk
- Training costs to train pharmacy partners may increase. What to do: Include this cost in the budget of the product and must have a plan to recruit training personnel to do the job.
- Not enough feasible number of products and pharmacies so the app can kickstart (false availability, etc) What to do: Need to come up with a guideline for pharmacies to join, state clearly on their responsibilities, the minimum number of products they need to have on their merchant account, this can be good in some form of agreement (similar to product risk#2), however, this agreement is for the mass so there will be some minor changes.
- Demand risk: Failure to generate demand for product launch What to do: Start by discussing with Marketing and Operation, suggest to come up with ways to direct traffic from GetNow to this when launching at first. For stability growth, work with marketing to optimize the conversion rate.
- Other startups (competitors or partners) may copy the business model. What to do: Aware of this and come up with backup plans.
Unforeseeable risk
- Government regulation on pharmacy and online businesses (compliance) What to do: Consult with the legal team prior to start any development work and notify the legal team at every step of the product progress.
- No more regulations 16 and 15 (chỉ thị 15 và 16) from the government -> might drop in the number of DAU What to do: We need backup plans for this situation, however, if we can have this run first in the market since there are no other shipping services that can deliver prescribed drugs and we have a good awareness marketing campaign, then this will not be a problem.
- The surge in the number of users, demand, etc. What to do: Prepare all scenarios and plans with the engineering team on the tech side and operation team (customer service and operation) for such cases.
4. Going deeper in a specific flow, can you detail what the processing of an order would look like on the pharmacy side? (you can use your preferred format to communicate the solution as you’d communicate it to a team of designers & engineers. Please include a few wireframes)
Wireframes
5. What are some key metrics you’d use to measure the efficiency of the solution with the pharmacies?
- “complete” order complete rate
- Conversion rate funnel
- NPS – Net promoter score – How likely are they will promote this app to others?
- CSAT (customer satisfaction)
- CES (customer effort score)
- SLA (Service-level agreement)
- Does pharmacy growth earn more?
End of the challenge
© 2021. All Rights Reserved to Nguyen Le Cuong.