Medication Reminders

HealthHub is Singapore's national health app – a platform that holds appointment history, lab results, and prescription records for millions of users. Yet most interactions with it were fleeting: open it to book an appointment, get the slot, close it until next time.

That pattern pointed to a missed opportunity. The data to make HealthHub genuinely useful in daily life was already there. What was missing was a feature that put it to work. This case study documents how 15 user interviews led directly to that feature – not from a brief, but from what users themselves revealed they needed.

The result: a medication reminders feature that pre-fills from a user's existing prescription records, eliminating the setup burden that had caused abandonment in every comparable product. Usability testing across five tasks returned a 0% full failure rate, with every friction point identified and resolved through iteration.

The project didn't start with a feature in mind. It started with 15 interviews across two groups – young adults (mid-20s to 30s) and seniors (50s to 70s) – with one question: how do you actually use HealthHub, and where does it let you down?

The conversations began broad. But one topic kept surfacing without prompting.

Medication reminders came up in every conversation

When medication management entered the conversation, the reaction was consistent and immediate. Users didn't describe it as a nice-to-have – they described a real daily friction they were already working around. Many had built their own systems out of necessity: generic phone alarms, physical pill boxes, notes written on paper, relying on memory. These weren't preferences. They were workarounds for a gap nobody had filled.

When shown Health Buddy's existing medication reminder feature – a comparable product already on the market – users' initial enthusiasm quickly cooled. The setup was tedious, the flow confusing, and the amount of information required upfront was overwhelming. Most users abandoned it before finishing. The need was real. The existing solution just wasn't good enough.

What made this finding decisive was what HealthHub already held: prescription records. Users were manually recreating information the app had stored all along. The opportunity wasn't to build another reminder tool – it was to connect the data that already existed to the daily habit users were already trying to maintain.

Three things were clear by the end of research: users wanted this, existing solutions had failed them, and HealthHub was uniquely positioned to do it better.

The research crystallised around a single persona: the Proactive Patient. They take their health seriously, manage their own medications, and are diligent about taking them on time. But they're doing all of this manually – with workarounds that replicate information HealthHub already stores.

The problem wasn't a missing data source. It was that the data was sitting idle while users did the work themselves. That gap was what the feature had to close.

The core decision was straightforward: don't build another generic reminder tool. Use HealthHub's existing prescription data to remove the friction of setup entirely, and give users a feature that earns a place in their daily routine without demanding effort to get started.

The research had been explicit about why existing solutions failed. Health Buddy's abandonment problem wasn't a missing feature – it was friction at every step. So the design principle was to do the opposite: surface what HealthHub already knows, ask for as little as possible, and let users add more only if they choose to. Three principles shaped every design decision from that point.

Because Medication Reminders was being introduced into an existing government-facing product, visual consistency wasn't optional – it was essential to user trust.

The feature needed to look and feel familiar, maintaining the same visual language users already recognised so that the new screens felt like a natural extension of the app rather than a product they had never seen before.

The existing app was studied closely and its visual language reverse-engineered into a structured design system applied consistently across every screen. Every component, colour, and icon was rebuilt to match the live app exactly – not to constrain the design, but to ensure the feature felt like something that had always belonged there.

Five tasks were tested across critical points in the medication journey, from setting up a reminder to logging a dose to reviewing adherence over time. Most tasks performed well. Two surfaced friction that needed addressing.

Users struggled to notice the prescribing clinic as a starting point for setup – the entry point wasn't prominent enough to be found naturally. And medical abbreviations like PO and TDS, carried over from the prescription data, created confusion at the point users needed the most clarity. Neither problem was discovered by assumption. Both were observed in testing, which is why both got fixed.

Each finding fed a specific revision: a more prominent entry point, plain-language medication details in place of clinical shorthand, and a confirmation step to catch duplicate reminders before they were created.

After iteration, no user fully failed any task. Partial completions reflected friction points that had since been resolved. The 0% full failure rate across five tasks validated that the direction was right and the decisions were sound.

The insight driving this project was straightforward: HealthHub already had everything it needed to be part of users' daily lives. The prescription data was there. The medical records were there. What was missing was a feature that connected that data to the routine users were already trying to maintain – one that removed the work rather than adding to it.

The pill boxes, the phone alarms, the handwritten notes – every workaround users had quietly built for themselves was the signal. They weren't managing their medications informally because they preferred it that way. They were doing it because nothing better existed. Medication Reminders was built to replace all of it, not by asking users to do more, but by finally putting the information HealthHub already held to work for them.

A daily reminder is more than a nudge. It's the beginning of a habit, and a habit is what makes an app genuinely worth keeping.