Designing for Real-World Burdens
Perx Health is a chronic health medication management platform that helps patients stay adherent to complex treatment schedules. One of the biggest friction points was the process of adding a medication into the app.
The original design required 11 steps of manual entry for every drug. For chronic patients managing multiple prescriptions, this meant a process that was both time-consuming and mentally exhausting. My goal was to reimagine this flow to save time, reduce frustration, and make adherence easier to achieve.
Problem
Too Many Steps Create Drop-Off
The original 11-step flow took 3–5 minutes to complete per medication. For a patient on 10 daily prescriptions, this could mean 30–50 minutes of setup just to get started. Many users dropped off before completing, leaving their medication list incomplete.
Cognitive Overload for Chronic Patients
Patients with multiple conditions already manage a heavy daily load. Manually typing drug names, dosages, timings, and instructions amplified stress, making the app feel like an additional burden rather than a helper.
Impact on Engagement and Adherence
Internal analytics showed:
Only 38 percent of new users completed adding all of their medications.
Drop-off increased significantly after the fourth or fifth entry.
Users who failed to add all medications were 52 percent less likely to engage with reminders consistently.
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If it takes more effort to set up than to remember on my own, why would I keep using it?”
Designing Around Human Limits
We began by mapping the medication entry process and comparing it against UX best practices for task completion. Nielsen Norman Group’s guidelines stress that long sequential forms increase drop-off, especially in health contexts.
Exploring AI Assistance
We identified a key opportunity: most patients receive medications with a printed pharmacy label. By allowing users to snap a photo of the label, we could pre-fill drug name, dosage, frequency, and instructions using OCR and AI, leaving only final confirmation to the patient.
Reducing Cognitive Load
Even without AI, we restructured the form into a lightweight, progressive flow that prioritized essentials first. This minimized fields shown at one time and reduced the perceived effort of completion.
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From 11 Steps to 3
The new design centered on three simple actions:
Take a photo of the medication label.
Review the auto-filled information.
Confirm and save.
Fallback for Non-AI Users
We designed a parallel lightweight manual entry that felt fast and aligned with best practices. Instead of 11 sequential screens, the form condensed into grouped fields with smart defaults.
Patient-Centric Testing
Usability sessions showed that patients could add a medication in under 45 seconds using the new flow. Feedback was positive: patients described the feature as “finally practical” and “a relief compared to before.”
Solution
The redesigned flow created a dramatic reduction in friction.
AI-powered photo capture pre-filled most fields instantly.
Streamlined fallback design reduced manual entry from 11 steps to 5 grouped fields on one screen.
Best practice alignment used progressive disclosure, clear affordances, and minimal typing to reduce cognitive load.
Operational impact:
Reduced setup time by 70–80 percent per medication.
Patients with 10 prescriptions saved 25–40 minutes of setup time.
Significantly lowered frustration, with usability testing scoring ease-of-use at 8.9/10 compared to 5.6/10 previously.
Impacts
The new medication entry flow created measurable improvements across adoption and engagement:
+62 percent increase in patients completing medication setup during onboarding.
Average setup time reduced from 3–5 minutes per drug to under 1 minute.
Drop-off rate decreased by 48 percent compared to the original flow.
Patients reported higher confidence in the app, with 81 percent describing the new flow as “easy” or “very easy.”
Operationally, this redesign meant less time spent setting up and more time engaging with reminders and rewards — the behaviors directly tied to adherence outcomes. By reducing cognitive and time burdens, Perx Health positioned itself as a true enabler of better medication management for chronic patients.
