The Target pill bottle isn't a bottle, it's a system

By Brandon Schauer 28 Comments

It’s unfortunate that the 2005 design of the Target pill bottle has too often been treated as just a product design and graphic design solution. Yes, it received much earned respect for being a collaboration of graphic design with industrial design and for its sensitive approach to addressing sometimes life-threatening circumstances. But perhaps because it’s been put on a pedestal at the MoMA that we forgot to check out what’s going on behind the scenes at Target.

Target ClearRX pill bottleTarget appropriately calls the bottle ClearRX, describing it more broadly as a, “prescription distribution and communication system.” That’s because it required quite a bit of work on the back-of-the-house to make the pill bottles work on the front-of-the-house.

Let’s take one aspect of the design as an example. The bottles have rings that fit around the collar of the bottle which are color coded to identify different members of the family — 7 colors in all. The concept is simple enough: Make sure you’re not accidentally taking someone else’s prescription just because the bottles look similar. However, the implementation is much more difficult because Target has to ensure the right color ring is going around the right subscription. Therefore Target’s Pharmacy IT system has to track which family member has which color ring so the colors are not accidentally switched when prescriptions are filled.

From listening to Deborah Adler tell the story of working with Target, it’s clear that considerable (if not more) design effort went towards the processes and systems surrounding the pill bottle. It was, “an enormous undertaking… a huge collaborative effort,” she said. Here’s a hint of some of the overall system that had to be coordinated:

“I work with the pharmacy team, pharmacy operations… the Target technology team to build the software to accommodate the new labeling system, the marketing team… there were major training sessions to train all the pharmacists on how to use this new system because they were the most important people to us… they were the front line… they had to explain how to use this new system, and they had to learn how to use it.. there was a bit of a learning curve involved.”

I’m guessing that it’s not just the design patents that have kept other pharmacies from mimicking the Target pill bottle. The pill bottle isn’t just a new SKU in a retail environment or just a piece of packaging that can be swapped out for the old design. The bottle is just the visible tip of a much deeper system of drug delivery that would take significant time and investment to emulate.

ClearRX - the system behind the target pill bottle

For me, the inspiration of this story is how a design artifact and a compelling story from Deborah Adler could spark the evolution of Target’s drug delivery system. When the-way-things-should-be aligns with a competitive advantage, great design ideas are more likely to come to fruition. In these cases, design prototypes and good storytelling can show the way things should be, and allow a productive discussion around what’s necessary to make things happen.

There are 28 comments on this idea.

AG

Brandon, are you familiar at all with actor-network theory? As abstract as it may seem, wrapping my head around it has definitely helped me unpack “systems” like these, so I can understand what’s going on in them. I think you’d find the encounter useful - and apologies if ANT is already part of your armamentarium.

Make your product part of a system: How To Be A Go

[...] Peter’s colleague Brandon Schauer provides another example of an effective system — the Target pill bottle. In this case, it’s not part of a system like how the iPod and iTunes are, but part of a system with other IT systems and pharmaceutical systems. All of those need to be working in harmony to provide the added value that the consumer receives. [...]

Spunlogic Blog » Blog Archive » Design

[...] Think Systems—And Leverage Them Perhaps my favorite part of the presentation, Peter described how a customer experiences not just a product but a system.  The system is comprised of the brand/company’s processes, or channels (web, paper, IVR / call center, store, etc.), or more.  The product is just an interface to access the system.  For example, the iPod itself doesn’t have much functionality.  It’s the iPod device (to access the media) and iTunes software (to manage and buy the media) together that make the system, albeit a system Apple tightly controls.  A more complicated but still tightly controlled system is Target’s prescription bottle and communication system. [...]

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