REDESIGNING MEDICINE LABEL
Taking medicine by mistake is commonly found among older patients in Hong Kong. Some may lead to fatalities, particularly for older patients who live in solitude. With no doctors, pharmacists or friends on hand to help, these elderly patients have to struggle with the small print and poor information design often found on medicine labels. In this project, we need to improved and re-designed medicine labels in our public hospitals.
CURRENT MEDICINE LABEL
To make our design more convincing, we did 12 user tests with the elderly who have different health problems. First hand user experience is important for us to improve the prototype of redesigning medicine label. We found that we could not ask them in direct questions because they could find the answer easily by the direction. Therefore, we set some scenarios for the user test finally. It can test our prototype more effectively.
Problems of The MEDICINE LABEL
1/ No Chinese medicine name
2/ Total dosage is not obvious to see
3/ No expiry date on the label
4/ No information priority for audience
5/ No hospital contact number
IMPROVED MEDICINE LABEL
The improved traditional medicine label is base on low budget and traditional default-printing system. We use bold and bigger font size because the elderly can read the information easily. The vertical format can lead the audience read the information from top to bottom. We add some information that hasn’t before such as dosage, expiry date and contact number.
NEW PACKAGING & MEDICINE LABEL
New packaging and medicine label is base on the result of user test. We design a new packaging because the elderly cannot open the current packaging easily and medicine easy to get destroyed. Also, the new medicine label can help user to calculate the right time to take medicine without human thinking.
Sounded Medicine label
As our objective is that we should improve and re-design a medicine label that is easily understandable, accessible for all people especially for elderly. However, we found out that our traditional medicine label and roll medicine label cannot fulfill all people, such as blind people and the illiteracy. Therefore, we consider word and image with sound can almost fulfill all people so we have a further development in this way. It is a concept idea that we can print a QR code on the medicine label and let user scan it through smart phone or code reader. Below is our code reader reference.
This is a cellphone called John’s phone, which is the most simple cellphone in the world. We take it as our reference the phone’s buttons are big enough for our target audience such as elderly and illiteracy. Also, it has speaker which also facilitate the users.