The Pill Club
The Pill Club is an online women's health company focused on prescribing birth control to people with periods. We're on a mission to be a trusted healthcare partner for women, empowering them through access, choice, and education – all while delivering a positive and personal experience. You can learn more at https://thepillclub.com/about-us
Why Dermatology
The Pill Club wants to be the go-to place for women/people with periods' journey through life. This means TPC needs to go beyond birth control and into new product lines. Dermatology was the perfect opportunity to test TPC's ability to launch new product lines and begin to meet patient needs holistically.
Birth control is prescribed for a variety of health concerns beyond contraception, like acne, regulating periods, and reducing menstrual pain. Providing prescriptions for birth control with proven track records in controlling acne is a no brainer - but this doesn't mean the acne will go away completely. To have comprehensive acne care options TPC decided to jump into topical dermatology as another option, or supporting product, for our patients.
The Stakes
To determine the viability of a skincare line, we needed to launch a limited pilot with existing members. 60% of surveyed users interested in a prescription skincare line were between the ages of 18 and 25 years old, and 31% wanted to be immediately informed of any TPC skincare product launch.
We knew we were entering a space where we had at least 6 competitors who had more mature experiences, but were limited in total Rx offered. TPC has always shown with the breadth of insurance coverage taken and we saw that as leverage for getting into a more comprehensive dermatology experience at a better price.
The MVP
Our goal was to convert ~50 existing birth control patients into dermatology patients upon launch on March 30, 2021. This experience would rely on an outsourced MVP medical questionnaire funnel to give Product and Design more time to put together requirements with medical and compliance staff once we received initial results.
A scrollable view of the desktop experience - please click in for full effect 😊
MVP Outcomes
Success! We acquired more than double our patient goal within 2 days of going live. 50% of patients who signed up were hardstopped, an internal term meaning our medical staff would not be able to service them due to varying risks, but of the patients we could support we were able to ship our first 20+ prescriptions out after 72 hours of the pilot launch.
Major pain points we identified were:
- Medical staff spent a majority of their time confirming information placed in free text fields.
- Manual tracking of answers given by existing birth control patients showed a high discrepancy between answers given in the birth control questionnaire and the new dermatology questionnaire.
- Hardstops were occurring at rates higher than expected - resulting in questions about wording and context in marketing.
- When patients submitted images of their skin we found there were resolution issues, and patients weren't following/did not understand the photo guidelines.
- If a patient was asked to resubmit images, if they did not do so within 24 hours we saw high rates of abandonment due to being forced through the questionnaire a second time.
We will be addressing these issues upon the release of our in-house funnel, which includes upgrades to the overall user experience and internal tools our medical staff use.
Initial Landing Page Changes for Another Pilot
With the pilot in California being successful, we made plans to update the landing page. We updated our copy below the CTA's to include pricing, added user reviews, and revised the image of our staff doctor to reflect our Chief Medical Officer rather than our dermatology advisor.
Who did I build this with?
- New Products team under Growth (Primary)
- Medical (Primary)
- Engineering, developing a new pattern and scaling for prescription product sign-up
- Product Management
- Marketing
- Brand
The Future
I'll be taking on the end-to-end experience for our dermatology experience as the lead designer. We are currently working towards a larger launch in multiple states, developing a delightful sign-up experience, and comprehensive account experience for patients with birth control and dermatology prescriptions. This project will be continuously updated as we progressively roll out Dermatology state-by-state!
You can see our press release in the TPC blog, as well as listen to our CEO speak about women's health + our foray into dermatology.
References
https://www.webmd.com/skin-problems-and-treatments/acne/birth-control-for-acne-treatment
https://www.aad.org/public/diseases/acne/derm-treat/hormonal-therapy