Dischem
Dis-Chem is one of South Africa’s leading retail pharmacy chains, offering a wide range of healthcare, wellness, beauty, and lifestyle products. Beyond medicine dispensing, Dis-Chem operates as a holistic health ecosystem with integrated clinic services, loyalty programs, insurance offerings, and specialty verticals such as Baby City and Dis-Chem Life.
With a strong presence across retail and digital channels, Dis-Chem aims to make healthcare more accessible, affordable, and convenient for customers across urban and semi-urban markets.
My Role
Visual Direction & UX
Outcome
MVP turned into Full Time
What was the ask?
The objective was to reimagine the Dis-Chem mobile experience end-to-end, building a high-fidelity concept that senior leadership could review, align on, and use to drive future investment in the product.
The focus areas included:
Addressing critical UX and usability gaps in the current app
Improving information architecture and navigation clarity
Enhancing visual polish without losing brand familiarity
Demonstrating how the app could evolve into a more modern, scalable product
Competitive Landscape
Dis-Chem operates in a highly competitive ecosystem that includes:
Local pharmacy chains
International healthcare retailers
E-commerce and quick-commerce platforms
Supermarket and delivery-first apps entering the health space
Understanding how these competitors balance trust, speed, accessibility, and digital convenience was critical to defining the future direction of the Dis-Chem app.
Old Screens
Our approach
Over the 2-month project period, we worked within a tight timeline and ran UI benchmarking and UX work in parallel. While one track focused on UI and competitor benchmarking, the other focused on information architecture, user flows, and navigation definition.
Although the brief was limited to an MVP, but we need to map out all core journeys upfront—including main navigation and the Better Rewards experience—to ensure the product felt cohesive, usable, and scalable for future phases.
This approach helped us move fast while building a strong foundation for long-term product evolution.
Competitive Benchmarking
We started by studying how leading retail pharmacies handled discovery, prescriptions, checkout, and rewards of Boots, Walgreens, Life Pharmacy UAE, and others. Each screen was annotated with what worked, what didn't, and where the opportunity was, setting the foundation for everything that followed.
App checklist & IA
From the benchmarking, we built a feature checklist comparing Dis-Chem against direct competitors like Walgreens, Clicks Pharmacy, and Takealot, surfacing exactly which features were table stakes, which were differentiators, and which were missing. In parallel, we defined the app's information architecture and core navigation patterns.
Wireframing
With IA locked, we ran low-fidelity wireframing across four flows in parallel - Shop & Purchase, Onboarding, Pharmacy, and Home. Each track was owned by one designer, then stitched together into a single end-to-end user journey. Wireframes were the source of truth for every UI decision.
Wireframes
Style guide & Components
We built the visual system from scratch. Typography pairing of Montserrat and Open Sans, local components, input fields, buttons, and product cards. Everything was designed for reuse across Shop, Pharmacy, Home, and Onboarding flows, keeping the app visually coherent at scale.
Local Components
Typeface
New registration
The registration flow was redesigned to minimise friction and simplify onboarding. Flexible sign-up options, reduced form complexity, and OTP verification help users get started quickly while enabling early personalisation.
Prototype & Micro Interaction
To bring the MVP closer to a real-world experience, we introduced micro interactions and motion cues during the prototyping phase.
These interactions focused on:
Providing reassurance during critical moments like payment and order confirmation
Clearly communicating order status through progressive updates
Reducing anxiety in delivery-related journeys
The prototype demonstrates:
Payment completion feedback
Order placed confirmation
Real-time order status progression
This helped stakeholders and real users at the client’s end experience the flow, not just review static screens, making the MVP more tangible and testable.
Subscription Model – Better Rewards
Dis-Chem’s Better Rewards program was already in place. The challenge was that the value and benefits of the program were not being communicated clearly within the app, which limited user awareness and usage.
Our work focused on redesigning the experience so users could better understand what Better Rewards offers, easily discover ongoing benefits, and use their rewards seamlessly while shopping—without changing the existing business or subscription model.
Thanks for watching!
Due to the confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement (NDA) associated with the project, more visual representations cannot be shared in this public forum.
If you would like more details about the project,
please feel free to Get in Touch
