place your pharmacy at the front of the store (aka, design for your users)

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Jun 4, 2007

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While shopping at a local Meijer store today, I watched a frail, elderly couple make their way, slowly, to the pharmacy at the back of the store. The woman moved a few inches with each shuffle of her feet, while the man rolled at a similar pace in an electric scooter; both looked as though a collision with a butterfly could hurl them to the floor. I glanced at the other people in line at the pharmacy, and saw several older folks whose days of running marathons are distant memories. Assuming that older folks account for a notable amount of pharmacy revenue, I wondered, "Why did Meijer put the pharmacy all the way back here?". I then recalled that the Rite-Aid stores, the Kroger's and a handful of other pharmacies in the area also have their pharmacies in the back of the store. Why?

I don't know why, but it's not important for the purpose of this story. What is important is the parallel between ineffective design in the brick & mortar world and it's internet counterpart. I'm no retail genius, so perhaps there are reasons that justify placing pharmacies at the back of the store; but on the web and in software GUI design, there are virtually no good excuses for making your users travel "to the back of the store" to use the features they need most. Regardless, it still happens on the vast majority of e-commerce, government and business websites. Broken design is easy to fix though (well, we think it is).

By involving users in your design process, from the first meeting through launch, you can learn how they'll use the software before you've written a single line of code. Using products like Axure's RP Pro, you can build a working prototype of your application in a matter of hours. Then put the prototype in their hands, give them tasks to complete, and learn from their interactions with your software. With a tool like Techsmith's Morae, you can easily watch and record users while they work with your prototype, even if your development team is 1/2 way around the world.

Take what you learn, dissect it and make your software better.

Test again.

Dissect again.

Now, start writing code.

Or better yet, hire us to do it. But don't write rigid applications that force users into a "your way or the highway" mode of operation. With the power of database-driven sites, advanced scripting like ASP, ASP.Net & PHP, and technologies like AJAX, you can allow customers to personalize your software to behave the way they want it to. The customer loyalty, praise and referrals you'll earn from the extra work will by far outweigh the time and slight costs you'll incur to make websites that people actually enjoy using.