For this challenge, I chose to revisit Challenge 8, in which my team and I conceived of an application to allow non-native english speakers to find the medicine they need more easily in pharmacies. While we arrived at a solution that we felt addressed the problem within our limited time frame, we did believe there was room for improvement. One feature we discussed but didn’t actually end up including in our final concept was a quiz-style method for identifying medicines that may treat user symptoms. I could very well see this search method being more intuitive and usable than a traditional drug name query. For instance, if a user felt lost in a US pharmacy, they might not intuitively think to search for the US-equivalent of the medicine they would get back home. They would, however, still be able to readily assess their symptoms and therefore may more intuitively seek out a drug that treats their symptoms, familiar or not. Since ease of use was a focal point of our design, it’d seem justified to incorporate a quiz-like query method that would ask users questions, one at a time, about their symptoms and successively narrow down possible drug treatments. Once enough questions have been answered, users would be provided with a list of recommended drugs and their corresponding drug profiles in the Medex (medical index). Additionally, using iconography with the symptoms described in each question would serve to help bridge the language barrier.
