1.
Blush allows you to create and customize illustrations in your designs by just dragging and dropping onto your canvas.

2.
UI Faces aggregates thousands of avatars which you can carefully filter to create your perfect personas or just generate random avatars.

3.
Rename It keeps your Sketch files organized, enabling you to batch rename layers and artboards.

4.
SPELLL constantly checks your Figma document for any spelling errors and lets you fix them with a single click.

5.
Stark can quickly help you keep tabs on accessibility requirements in your designs.

Want to talk more design with us? Become an Altoid! Check out our careers page, or don’t hesitate to send us a tweet.

Reduce online critique fatigue with Loom.
Spending any more than the 2 hours of critique we already dedicate to Design Workshop, can drag out the day and does not encourage lively feedback. Loom makes it easy to record a 2–3 minute video and get really rich feedback from the team, complete with time stamps and emojis.

Finally make that switch to Figma.
It’s painful to have all of your legacy files in Sketch — but with collaboration and file sharing so much easier in Figma, it’s maybe never more important than now to make the move. Plus, did you know you can just drag a Sketch file into your Figma drafts and it automagically translates into a Figma file?

Don’t live without a whiteboard.
Quick sketching that all cross-functional collaborators can pick up is what whiteboards were made for. Thankfully, Miro allows for easy collaboration, and we are seeing from engineers and PMs begging for Miro seats and throwing out their LucidChart accounts. We’ve also tried out FigJam, Figma’s answer to Miro, and though not as feature-rich, gets the job done.

Create space for fun.
Without the ease of being able to just casually have a laugh in the kitchen, get to know your teammates with an icebreaker ritual. Every team standup (even before COVID), we do a lightning round of Question of the Week, where we go around and get to know each other in under 30 seconds. Our favorite examples: “What is your single, ultimate favorite color of all time?” or, “What is something you thought would be a great idea but was terrible when you actually did it?”

Develop a New Hire Onboarding Deck
You haven’t lived in COVID times until you’ve had members of your team entirely interview and onboard without ever stepping foot into the office. One-third of our team had this experience! A tool that helped teammates acclimate is a deck that can not only include handy resources and links, but a page where each member of the team can introduce themself.

Keep tapping folks on the shoulder.
if you’re using Slack and Zoom, did you know that you could create a virtual room with the command “/zoom” ? And out pops up an instant Zoom link in the conversation without having to make a calendar invite?

Celebrate!
It’s easy to let milestones like a feature release or a baby shower go without an event because it’s way harder to organize a virtual call and still make it feel fun. But it’s important for bonding and making space for the great work you’ve done.

It’s easy to plan — buy some DoorDash gift certificates for a group lunch — or make it special, like booking an Airbnb Capoeira class with the teacher in Brazil! Even simple things, like having the pets on the team wish someone a happy birthday can help nurture togetherness.

Want to talk more UX with us? Become an Altoid! Check out our careers page, or don’t hesitate to send us a tweet.

1.
My friend Agatha, who I used to work with at Oculus, has been playing around a lot with 3D animation and different styles. (Christophe Tauziet, Head of Design)

2.
As a sign painter, I’m biased towards crushing on sign painting and illos. (James Butler, Product Designer)

3.
Discovered this rad ceramic artist recently! (Molly Abrams, Product Designer)

4.
This analysis is just kinda fun. (Casey Kawahara, Product Designer)

5.
I’ve been reading through this book about Eva Zeisel — she’s such an inspiration. (Izac Ross, Design Manager)

Want to talk more design with us? Become an Altoid! Check out our careers page, or don’t hesitate to send us a tweet.

Get to know the folks who make up our UX team here at Alto Pharmacy!

What do you do at Alto?

I’m a Product Design Lead who specializes in Design Systems.

Design systems are a shared, understood set of guidelines — ranging from everything from high-level stuff like design principles, decision-making frameworks, to really granular details like border widths. Day-to-day, it usually means a library of components and guidelines that designers and engineers can use to enable better consistency and efficiency.

Ultimately, it helps the team focus more on the hard things in their work, and less on the little things. There’s a quote I like to use a lot when talking about design systems — “Make easy things easy and hard things possible.”

You’ve worked at a lot of fun places like Apple and Uber. What drew you to the healthcare space?

I’ve spent most of my career in tech and a lot of the problems are fun. And I’ve certainly had a lot of jobs that are really fun, like working on music at Apple and being one of the first platform designers at Uber. And I wholeheartedly believe work should be fun! Fun gets you going in the morning and keeps you excited through the day.

While fun is great and still something high on my list, I was missing this connection between what I was spending my time working on, and how that made a difference in someone’s life. I was thinking, If I am so lucky to have such privilege to choose what I want to work on, perhaps it would be more meaningful to make an impact on that bottom half of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Alto is really at the technology and social impact overlap. And my mom is a pharmacy technician, and so there was a personal reason that drew me in. I figured, why not take the plunge?

I’ve found since I’ve started working at Alto and in healthcare, you tend to have really empathetic coworkers that are looking for the same thing — deeper meaning in the work that you do and in how you spend your time.

With your mom as a pharmacy technician, what did you see about what she did?

Oh gosh. You know, what’s so funny is I feel like I’ve never been able to talk about work with my mom in a lot of ways because our worlds are so different.

I remember when I was a kid. I used to go to the pharmacy with her, and I remember thinking that it was like a little pill factory and it was fun for me to go and see her world.

I feel like I know her better now. As a pharmacy technician, she’s trained to pay attention to detail and to consider every risk, because sometimes it’s literally a matter of life and death. And as her daughter, now I get why she’s hyper cautious and a bit of a Nervous Nellie, though I sort of wish I gained this empathy when I was, say, in high school…

Has she said anything about you working for a pharmacy?

She works in a hospital and she’s part of the generation where they accept the tools that they have, for better or worse. So I don’t think she’s ever imagined a world where they didn’t use this really antiquated software or even think that a company would build their own.

It’s been cool to be able to draw the parallels and also open up her mindset beyond what she’s ever thought was possible.

What have been some of the unique challenges you’ve encountered with doing design systems for Alto?

Our audiences all serve different needs. Patients, providers and our internal ops team — they all totally have different points of view and jobs to be done. Our software thus serves really different needs, even though at the end of the day we still prioritize patient-centricity.

So I think trying to understand those underlying differences and what that means in terms of a design system — what they share, what they shouldn’t, and why — has been hard to resolve. Alto’s at this stage where we’re still defining a lot of those things.

What have you been most proud of?

I think the tide that I am starting to see is a shift in terms of the amount of influence that a design team can have on the product. I think that with more permission to be opinionated about solutions, people can think beyond just the feature or problem you were handed from your PM. I like to characterize it as a shift from “checking” the boxes to “defining” them.

Project-wise, all the stuff that I’ve worked on, I’ve been super stoked about! For example, the AltoMD mobile app we got to build from the ground up and opportunistically rebuild our external native design system.

What are your top tips for someone contemplating getting into the healthcare space?

Always be humble and adopt a beginner’s mindset. There’s so much complexity to understand, so going into things saying, “You know what? I don’t know what I don’t know,” is totally okay. And that’s okay.

Another really big one is being open to those around you as influencing your decision-making and your design work. I’ve always felt like I wasn’t ever really emotionally attached to my work, but – for example, on this project that I’ve been on which is moving quite fast – I feel like even hourly, my decision-making has been challenged. So I don’t underestimate research, particularly in an industry where I feel like even on the patient-side, I’m an outsider: I don’t take a lot of meds, I don’t have any chronic conditions.

With user research, I’m really trying to put myself in the shoes of the person that I’m designing for and not really make any assumptions of what their needs are. Which was really different from other jobs, because I was always an Uber user, or a Beats listener and I could very easily put myself into the audience’s shoes. At Alto, I’ve really had to do more understanding about who those folks are.

What do you do for fun?

I like being outside a lot, so we bought a trailer a few years ago. It’s pretty old. It’s from the 70s. And we totally redid it on the inside. Lately, we’ve just been taking it on weekend trips because of coronavirus, but before that, we used to take longer road trips, sometimes months at a time. I really love being from California and the Bay Area — there’s always places to discover. So we’ve been enjoying that. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that.

And we have a bunch of animals. We just got a puppy, so that keeps us busy all the time.

Want to meet more Altoids? Come work with us! Check out our careers page, or don’t hesitate to send us a tweet!

Healthcare, now more than ever, feels like a complicated and expensive part of American life. Dramatically rising medication costs drive fear and dissatisfaction for patients who have few tools to understand what treatments will cost before entering the healthcare system. Compounding the problem are the industry’s complex web of players (from government to insurance to manufacturers) and opaque processes which leads to consumers feeling lost and deferring critical care. In fact, studies estimate that approximately 50% of patients do not take their medications as prescribed, leading to worsening conditions that can impact health more severely long term.

At Alto, our mission is to unlock the potential that pharmacies have as a health partner who is there for you, even if you change providers. We are a REAL-LIFE pharmacy (with expert pharmacists directing care and influencing the build of our products) that also conveniently delivers affordable medications to your door. Unlike the incumbents in the space (CVS, Walgreens), or some new players with limited reach who focus only on the software and specific conditions, we believe in delivering a modern, tech-forward experience for ALL patients.

Our product team is laser-focused on designing new solutions in an industry that has remained unchanged for decades. Here are some of the challenges we’re currently tackling and how we imagine the future of pharmacy will look.

The Alto Difference

What does the traditional experience of obtaining your medications look like? It’s often a complicated, opaque dance between your provider, your insurer, the drug manufacturer and then eventually, the pharmacy that actually hands you the medication. Unfortunately, all too often a patient will go to their local retail pharmacy, wait in line for 20 minutes, then find out at the counter, in front of other shoppers, that their insurance isn’t covering their medication, and their out-of-pocket expenses could cost hundreds or thousands of dollars!

Why aren’t these medications covered? More and more, as patients live longer to experience more complex conditions (Diabetes Type 2) or as medical treatments become more sophisticated and accessible at home (fertility treatments), the healthcare industry is struggling to play catch up. For example, our interviews with endocrinologists around the country have reinforced the positive impact that continuous glucose monitors have on patient outcomes, yet very few insurance plans will cover their cost without some sort of appeal. Similarly, the expensive critical injections needed for a typical In vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle force patients of the incumbent pharmacies to navigate multi-step phone trees and wait anxiously for days on a time-sensitive delivery.

Alto simplifies the patient experience by providing helpful, pro-active communication from whatever channel is easiest — phone, SMS or app. In a few taps, you can order your medications from our app, and have them safely hand-delivered that same day, for free.

Our dedicated patient advocates will also do everything in their power to lower your price, from talking to your provider about lower cost generics to hunting for coupons that make brand medications more affordable, all to ensure that you get the best possible health care experience on your journey to becoming well.

Designing Experiences at Alto

Delivering an excellent patient experience is what drives the entire product team. How do we make Alto — the service, not just the app — feel easy, trustworthy and delightful?

Luckily, this shared sense of purpose brings out the best in our collaborations — we believe wholeheartedly in the three-legged stool of product, design and engineering, with functional leads working closely from the very inception of a project idea to the last line of code released. We know we don’t have all the answers, so often that stool expands out to include our care team who are on the frontlines of fielding patient questions, or our data analysts who can examine where patients are tuning out. And finally, user research is deeply embedded into our practice — whether it’s drilling into the specific behaviors of cardiology patients, or shadowing our hard-working operations team.

From these lenses, we will often get into divergent thinking mode, using cross-functional workshops where everyone from engineering to pharmacists, are invited to contribute ideas. From there, the teams will work in an agile process, developing PRD’s, mocks and TDDs together, with each expert driving their own deliverables while checking in closely with their partners. We believe iteration is a natural part of the creative process, and that means each function is constantly checking-in, iterating and influencing each others’ work. Our agile sprint schedule also means those iterations can be incorporated dynamically into our building process.

So that we can focus and deeply empathize with the unique pain points of all our users, our product teams are divided by user type:

Patient team: focuses on all patient touch points, whether it’s seeking out high touch, personalized help by texting or calling our care team, or quickly and easily ordering a delivery from the native iOS/Android app.

Provider team: focuses on meeting the needs of our clinics and providers. We provide custom software and operational support to help make sending in prescriptions painless, efficient and secure.

Pharmacy team: encompasses all of the tools that our pharmacists, techs, and care team need to deliver high quality care to our patients. This could include either our digital or physical footprint, for example, a service design blueprint for our warehouse inventory team, the UI for a physical scanner used to track medications throughout our fulfillment process, or a guided UI flow for our insurance billers.

From every touchpoint, we are obsessed with ensuring our features deliver value — from the discreet package that the courier hand delivers to you (including a caramel to boot) to the look and feel of our retail locations (if you decide to stop by).

The uniqueness of Alto’s audiences

Another one of the most distinct aspects of working on the Alto product is the multitude of audiences we serve. Our founders have driven into the company DNA that we need to create a service that can be accessible to everyone, not just the 20-somethings who live in Silicon Valley. Our patients come from diverse backgrounds of different genders, abilities, and financial situations. Many of our patients are not early adopter tech users — they may be in their 50s or 60s, struggling with an out-of-date smart device and need larger font sizes to read text. They may be on Medicaid or Medicare, juggling a dozen critical drugs (on an average of 5–8 drugs, and as high as 20!), and worried about having enough money at the end of the month to pay for treatment.

We are often also facilitating more than one person’s health, too — for example, a parent managing their child’s asthma, or an adult child helping their elderly patient take their insulin on time.

We also don’t just work with patients — we have custom tools and services for clinics to increase their productivity and level of care. We are constantly talking with doctors and medical assistants, to understand how we can bring streamlined, modern experiences to their offices, so that they can spend less time in front of a computer and more time with patients.

And with the nature of our internal operations, we are never isolated to working with just other tech folks. From our pharmacists to warehouse staff to delivery drivers, we get an opportunity to submerge ourselves into so many different perspectives. Working in health care, and at Alto, is a unique thoroughfare into the lives of Americans from all walks of life.

Why Alto?

This is just a sampling of the challenges we are facing and passionate about tackling. We’re growing like crazy, from expanding to new geographies (Welcome Houston!) to deepening our relationships with the patients we serve. Our design team is expanding rapidly too, and it’s the perfect time to deep dive into an industry that is destined to touch all of our lives. Check out our careers page, or don’t hesitate to send us a tweet! We’d love to hear from you.