Price Page Redesign for Brand Drugs
Navigating competing tensions between patient savings, manufacturer partnerships, and sponsored placements while building an evidence-based design that increased manufacturer coupon clicks by 69% on desktop and 620% on mobile.
About the company
GoodRx is a leading prescription price transparency platform that gathers current prices and valuable savings for prescription drugs at virtually every pharmacy in America.
Context and challenge
GoodRx offers coupons to help people save on their prescriptions. However, coupons are not always the best savings option especially when it comes to brand drugs which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. To help people afford the drugs they need to maintain their well-being, GoodRx partners with manufacturers to reduce prices and connect eligible patients to the best savings.
While GoodRx was working on brokering more partnerships with manufacturers, my goal was to redesign the price page for brand drugs to improve the user experience. As the business grows, the challenge was to deliver the right design artifacts to make sure design solutions are user-centric while achieving the business goals of the company.
My role
As the lead designer, I took the full ownership of the redesign process from strategy to release, focusing on influencing product direction from a user experience design perspective.
Approach
Collaborate with multidisciplinary groups to ensure coverage from different vantage points on any challenges we faced.
Take an iterative, phased approach to the roll-out to allow for testing and user feedback collection.
Interview stakeholders and users to facilitate the best solutions.
01
Core Problem
The brand drug price page displayed comprehensive information but provided no hierarchy, no guidance, and no path to the savings that actually mattered, leaving patients overwhelmed at exactly the moment they needed clarity most.
Essential information is easy to miss
Basic, but essential drug information such as generic equivalent availability, average retail price, and insurance coverage is buried inside a lengthy drug description section that can be easily overlooked.
Unaffordable coupons take up valuable real estate
The current design of the price page is optimized for price comparison, showing coupons from all available pharmacies. However the relative difference in price across pharmacies is irrelevant for brand drugs if none of the options are within the user’s budget. In these cases, these rows unnecessarily take up real estate, making relevant, actionable choices much more difficult to find.
The best savings are stuffed at the bottom
Manufacturer coupons and patient assistance programs are often the best savings opportunities, potentially helping both commercially insured and uninsured patients pay $0 for their brand drugs. They are stuffed at the bottom of the page alongside insignificant savings tips, and are poorly presented with information that is irrelevant to a user that is simply searching for the lowest price.
02 The Uninsured Patient
No insurance coverage. GoodRx coupons may offer some relief, but patient assistance programs are often the only path to affordability. Urgently needs the most relevant option surfaced fast.
Key Research Finding
Users widely believed going through insurance always resulted in the best price. In reality, manufacturer programs often produce better outcomes, but only if patients understand the distinction first. This insight directly shaped the insurance filter as an education-first mechanism, not just a UI toggle.
User Understanding
To anchor design decisions, I identified two primary patient personas with meaningfully different needs and mental models when landing on the price page.
The Insured Patient
Has insurance but faces high out-of-pocket costs. Often unaware that manufacturer programs can supplement or even replace their insurance copay. Needs education before action.
Phase 1 - Optimize What Exists
Re-architect content hierarchy and introduce a modular system for rapid testing, without a full design overhaul
03
My Approach & Techniques
Experiment and measure design with viable front-end changes
While coming up with a research plan to help me understand our brand drug users and their journey looking for savings, my first instinct was to focus on the highest-impact changes achievable within existing front-end constraints.
1.
Re-architect the information hierarchy
Extracted pricing information from the drug description block and surfaced it prominently at the top — so the most relevant context was immediately visible on arrival.
2.
Modular component system
Rebuilt the page as independent, testable modules rather than a monolithic layout. This gave us the ability to run A/B tests on individual components without rebuilding the full page.
3.
Insurance labeling system
Introduced a visual labeling system to show which savings programs required insurance and which did not, helping users identify eligible options at a glance rather than reading through each one.
The modularized structure
Cost education module
By extracting the pricing information from the drug info section and displaying it in a compact, easier to digest format, we could help users see what they would likely pay with or without insurance immediately.
Savings programs modules
We reworked the hierarchy to show the most useful information such as pricing, insurance requirements, and contact information up top.
GoodRx exclusive offers module
Rather than show the extensive list of GoodRx coupons, we collapsed the list down to highlight the three lowest prices. If needed, users could expand this section to browse a more exhaustive list in case they were looking for other options (for instance, pharmacies that may be nearer, or more accessible from their homes).
Miscellaneous modules
Helpful but less immediately relevant information such as prices for 90-day supply and latest news were to continue to display in the same position on the bottom of the page.
Phase 1 Design
04Result
Significant engagement lift across all pilot drugs
We rolled out the redesign across 17 pilot brand drugs with limited insurance coverage and low GoodRx coupon conversion, tracked via link clicks to measure exposure to the best savings.
Manufacturer coupon click rate increased by
69% on desktop
620% on mobile web
Patient assistance program click rate increased by
46% on desktop
298% on mobile
Phase 2 - Design Tensions
When business goals and user goals collide
GoodRx launched Manufacturer Solutions — a new division focused on pharmaceutical partnerships, introducing two sponsored placements that Phase 1's design hadn't anticipated. Rather than treat this as a constraint, I reframed it as a design problem with three stakeholders who each needed something different from the same page.
For patients
Surface the lowest possible price clearly and quickly, without overwhelming or misleading then with options they are not eligible for.
For drug manufacturers
Maintain the visibility of sponsored savings programs specifically to the patients who are eligible for them, ensuring ROI on partnership investment.
For the Sales team
Create a scalable, demonstrable hook for expanding manufacturer partnerships. The needed to be a growth vehicle, not just a UX improvement.
Design Decision
An insurance-based filter was the key unlock: it let us show each user only the options relevant to them, which simultaneously reduced cognitive overload and ensured sponsored results were surfaced exclusively to eligible users, aligning all three stakeholder goals in a single mechanism.
01User Research
Puzzling out the brand drug users and their journeys
Understanding the userbase
Insurance survey, 1,515 responses
Collaborating with the marketing team, we launched a “Do you have health insurance?” survey on the brand drug pages to capture a snapshot our users’ insurance coverage.
Diving into user's mind
Interview 6 users who called GoodRx for brand drug consultation.
With a researcher, we designed a script for a guided interview offered to users who had called in for brand drug consultations. The goals of this interview were:
To collect user feedback on the phase 1 design.
To gather information around what the user journey was like from the moment they were prescribed a brand drug to the point they purchased the drug.
User journey map
Learnings
Education on drug savings is the key to connecting users to cost-cutting savings programs.
Contrary to popular belief, going through insurance does not always result in the best price. However, insurance can help make users eligible for various savings programs. By educating users on these facts, we could help users make more informed choices and maximize savings on their medication.
A better “shopping” experience is an opportunity to increase engagement with users.
Personalized savings options, and easy-to-understand instructions for the application would be pivotal in creating a better shopping experience and improving overall engagement with the GoodRx platform.
02Proposal
Insurance based, dynamic savings options
With the insights gathered from our user inquiries and research, we re-prioritized all the savings options and added an insurance filtering system to simplify choices for the users while ensuring sponsored savings programs to be highlighted for eligible users.
The new architecture
Drug info module
Similar to the first redesign, we displayed high level information such as treatment, generic availability, retail price, and insurance copay right at the top, giving users immediate access to the information that would be most relevant to them.
Simplified menu and settings
We grouped mutual functionalities that applied across all drug price pages, including those that apply to generic drugs, allowing users to find accurate GoodRx coupon prices based on their prescriptions.
Insurance filter
Instead of overwhelming users with a flood of options, we chose to provide a top-level filter based on the their insurance availability, allowing them to see only the savings programs and options that were relevant to them. This also gave us the opportunity to target sponsored results directly to the users that might use them.
Modularized savings options
As with phase 1 of the redesign, we continued to use a modular approach to allow us to test and scale new designs rapidly.
Miscellaneous modules
Again, helpful but less significant information continues to be displayed at the bottom the page.
Phase 2 Design Prototype
04Outcome & Reflection
Phase 1 shipped. Phase 2 didn’t. And that’s part of the story
Phase 2 was rejected by stakeholders who disagreed with the design direction. The insurance filter — the core mechanism that reconciled user needs with manufacturer visibility — was seen as introducing too much friction into a page the business wanted to keep broadly accessible. It was a hard call to accept, and one I still believe was the wrong one for users.
Where I Stood
The user research was clear: patients were overwhelmed by irrelevant options and missed the savings that could have cost them nothing. Phase 1 proved that better hierarchy moves people to better outcomes. Phase 2 was the logical next step, and I advocated for it with that evidence.
The Big Takeaway
Good design doesn't always ship. What matters is staying anchored to evidence, advocating clearly, and building systems resilient enough that partial progress still moves the needle for users. Phase 1 did that and that's what I'm most proud of here.