Creating an intuitive, easy-to-use pharmacy and medication app

The challenge

Our task was to create a mobile app designed to help people easily search for medications, pharmacies, and current special offers. The top priority was to provide an intuitive, user-friendly experience where anyone could find the information they were looking for quickly and efficiently.

The solution

We analyzed all the possible needs and use cases of our intended audience to learn what features we needed to include. We determined that the app should provide users with the ability to:

• Search for medications at the lowest price
• Find the most conveniently located pharmacies
• Locate 24-hour pharmacies
• Contact a pharmacy directly from the app

Infrastructure, design and UI/UX

When developing Pinpil, our goal was to create an advanced, trustworthy tool that was simple to use. So we gave Pinpil a minimalistic design with a professional, medical tone. The most important aspect of the app is the ability to search for medications, so we wanted it to be front and center.

After opening the app, the first screen the user sees is a search bar where they can type in the name of the medication they are looking for, brand name or generic. Pinpil then provides them with a list of medication types and dosages to choose from. The user simply selects the particular drug they are looking for, then they are taken to a screen showing a list of nearby pharmacies and the medication’s price at each one. Users can also view more information about the drug, including usage directions and active ingredients.

In keeping with the minimalistic, user-friendly interface, we designed each page to be simple, but professionally elegant, and kept the number of pages the user is exposed to at a minimum. We also added accessible tools to give users the ability to do things like bookmark drugs and share medication lists.

Our specialists wrote a technical task, where we described the entire infrastructure of the application, detailing all of the available actions users can perform on the interface.

Development

The main challenge in the development of software that combines different offline businesses, is that everyone has their own software and database update rules, formats and names. However, our client had already developed a service that aggregates data from different pharmacies. The service collects drug information in different formats, from emails to PDF files, then deposits all of the information into a primary database.

So we faced the challenge of gathering and normalizing all this pharmacy and drug data. Our servers also had to constantly update the normalized data as new information was received from the aggregate server. Our team used React Native and Redux to develop the app, then we optimized the build for iOS and Android from one code base.

The result

In the end, we satisfied the client's goal to create an intuitive, user-friendly pharmacy app for iOS and Android platforms. The simple, sleek design allows users to easily search for medications, find the lowest prices and applicable discounts, and locate and contact nearby pharmacies. Pinpil is consistently updated to provide users with the most current drug and pharmacy data available, making the app a reliable tool that users can trust to provide accurate information.