The Power of Fifty Bits by Bob Nease

Author:Bob Nease
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-11-13T16:00:00+00:00

CUES FOR THE CLUELESS, CLUES FOR THE CUE-LESS

You don’t have to take over a grocery store to make use of the “get in the flow” strategy. If you’ve ever left a note on the fridge for a family member (or one for yourself on the bathroom mirror), attached a sticky note to a co-worker’s computer monitor, or put a document on her chair, then you’ve used this fifty bits design strategy. You’ve put something you want noticed—we’ll call it a cue, because it’s a call to some type of action—in the natural flow of someone’s fifty bits.

Amazon and Netflix both understand the power of getting in the flow of the attention of their users. Both companies mine their enormous stores of behavior data and ratings (for products or movies) to make accurate and specific recommendations for individual customers. They know that your digital screen has your precious fifty bits, and they treat your attention as the scarce resource that it is: they deliver relevant recommendations in which you are likely to be interested. (Think about it: without great analytics, those recommendations would just be spam.)

Express Scripts took the opportunity to get in the flow of patients’ attention in a novel way when a few of their dispensing robots in the home delivery pharmacy were equipped with lasers. This technology allows custom messages to be etched onto the caps of the bottles after they are filled with each patient’s medicine.

Like a kid with a hammer looking for a nail to whack, we started looking for a problem to solve. It turns out we lost a lot of home delivery customers when they had no more refills left on their prescription. Specifically, among all of the patients who are sent the final refill on their prescription (i.e., who need a new prescription to keep getting their medications), about one-third end up leaving home delivery.

Through the lense of fifty bits, this drift back to retail pharmacies isn’t surprising. The patient may not be aware that he’s run out of refills and is running low on medication (inattention). Or if he is aware, he may put off calling the doctor’s office to get a new prescription (inertia). This means that many patients wait until they are out of medication to get a new prescription. Sometimes the doctor will provide a new prescription over the phone, but other times the patient will need to be seen. When that’s the case, there’s often a delay due to scheduling the visit. The bottom line is that many patients will experience a gap in medication coverage due to inattention and inertia. By the time they have their new prescription, they may not want to wait to have their medications sent by mail, so they just decide to have it filled at a retail pharmacy.

With this challenge in mind, we decided to etch one of five different messages, or cues, on the bottle caps for patients who were receiving their last refill and therefore needed to renew their prescription (see exhibit 6–1).

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