Timothy Dwyer - Optum Rx

senior designer
2019-present

OptumRX and Optum Home Delivery Pharmacy is a member facing PBM, private-label product, and open market pharmacy, which helps up to 200 million users to manage their prescriptions.

As a senior and lead product designer on the Optum RX design team, I am responsible for communication between the the product and design teams and overseeing designs for all capability work to make sure it aligns to our design standards and patterns, as well as satisfying all requirements from business, product and development.

Over the last 5 years, we leveraged member feedback and analytic data to create a design system for Optum RX/Home Delivery using Optum Brand guidelines with mui-react as a base framework component library. I work closely with a small group of front-end developers to ensure and inspect that the development tokens and components match our specs and maintain a working shared component library (SCL) in Storybook. In that time we created over 20 different private-label client themes and scaled the system to 5 products (microproducts) across the Optum RX/Optum ecosystem. Additionally, I am the lead designer on the Rx Management capability where I incorporate our design system and patterns into the existing legacy portal pages, fulfill product feature requirements and updates, and enhance the user experience with insights gained from our analytics and user research team, as well watching recorded user sessions in Glassbox.

The main challenge for the design system is to offer clean, simple layouts and flexible structures, so the user can quickly identify medications that need their attention. It is is also key that the pages follow a consistent look and component structure for a seamless and intuitive feel across the entire site. Additionally, we are working under the larger Optum brand, so the system has to conform and adapt to Optum guidelines and any changes or updates that may occur.

Content structure

The first element of the design system we designed was a very basic title/subtitle structure for displaying content. We used a familiar pattern of displaying the most important piece of information as a title in a larger, bold font with supporting pieces of content in a smaller, regular weight body font style.

A typical way we began using this was using the title area for a medication name and the subtitle area for to highlight key metadata values about the prescription that would help the user recognize the correct prescription and not get lost in confusing long names. The structure of the metadata can be flexible depending on the context of the page and action the user is taking. During user testing we found that users responded very well to separating the brand and generic name of a drug and showing the number refills remaining to help them quickly manage their prescriptions.

Containers & cards

We then took that basic content hierarchy and placed them inside different containers and cards that allow users to easily digest chunks of information and take specific actions. Other UI elemets, such badges, buttons, icons, or checkboxes are added to further highlight the main action or key information. We work closely with our A11Y engineers to ensure the hierarchy, code, and functionality of the cards exceeds WCAG standards.

Example of content structure in clickable cards with added badge UI element to designate statues for different prescriptions

A similar content structure and set of rules are placed into larger parent containers to group related actions or content on a page. The basic card structure has a consistent use of padding levels, and border weight, color, and radius, depending on the use and hierarchy inside their parent containers.

Drawer actions

Another early pattern we established was placing actions and additional copy inside drawers to allow the user to focus on one action or options to resolve an issue with their medication. Our goal was to reduce the cognitive load on the user by limiting the amount of information on the page and guiding them to the primary action.