Medly is a digital pharmacy that delivers medications and manages prescriptions for patients who previously had to call in every order. I led design on its new patient web platform from the ground up, from first research through launch, covering patient profiles, prescription management, checkout, and delivery scheduling. A separate designer and team owned the iOS app; I worked closely with them throughout and filled in on iOS when needed.
Within it, I led design on a self-serve checkout that let patients see what was ready to fill, choose what to pay for, and schedule delivery, without an agent on the phone.
65% of patient-support time given back
Given back from manual scheduling by full launch, freeing patient-support agents for higher-value patient care.
10× more deliveries scheduled per day
Scheduled deliveries grew from 20–30 a day at first launch to 250+ company-wide.
1,000+ prescriptions in a peak week
Prescriptions delivered in a single week, at peak.
Everything a patient might want to do ran through a single channel, a phone call with an agent:
Patients had no way to see what was on file, no way to schedule a delivery themselves, and no way to drop a single prescription from an order without calling in.
Objectives: let patients self-serve prescription selection and flexible delivery scheduling (with in-store pickup as an option), and free patient-support agents’ time for higher-value patient support.
The original plan routed checkout out to a separate, text-based mobile web app. Partway through, engineering discovered the two systems couldn't sync patient data, which would have forced patients to re-enter information they'd already given us in the middle of checkout. That left one real choice:
Our PM, engineering lead, and I pushed for the delay together. The whole point of the product was to get scheduling off the phone, and shipping a version that still required a call would have taught patients the app couldn't do the thing they needed it for. We moved the date, built checkout natively, and phased lower-priority pieces to protect the new timeline.
The project cycled through three product managers in a year. I was the constant, which meant design ownership expanded into keeping the work coherent across handoffs.
When a new PM joined, I walked the backlog with her to reconcile what had been specced against what the product actually needed, and flagged the features that had no tickets at all. We wrote requirements together from there.
The team had also never estimated work. I introduced sizing so we could forecast when phases would land, and proposed sizing well-documented front-end tickets asynchronously in Slack to keep it from becoming another meeting. Both stuck.
Medly was also going through a rebrand, so I worked with the iOS designer and team to rework the style guide and build shared components, like buttons and input fields, in a single Figma library for both platforms.
Because this was a pharmacy, design also meant working inside healthcare rules. I reviewed every new flow with Compliance to keep it HIPAA compliant.
I also worked closely with our Director of Clinical Relations, who spoke with patients directly every day. She regularly passed their feedback along to me, and when it was time for usability testing, she helped me recruit patients she worked with for sessions.
The self-serve flow I designed took the patient from what's on file to a scheduled delivery, start to finish, no call:
I ran a competitive analysis of pharmacy checkout flows, built on the shared component library, and prototyped the flow (view the prototype) for moderated usability interviews, recruiting real patients with help from Clinical Relations and walking them through checking out live prescriptions over Google Meet.
Patients moved through the flow smoothly overall: “Good. Like checking out on Amazon.” and “Pretty straightforward and easy” were typical reactions. But two specific points of friction showed up consistently, and each pointed to a change:
Those changes shipped in the final designs:
Many patients still preferred walking to their pharmacy in person. The new flow was additive to that relationship, not a replacement for it, and that nuance shaped how we talked about the feature internally.
Testing also surfaced the post-launch roadmap patients asked for directly: order cancellation and rescheduling, default payment methods, and richer delivery notifications.