context

In Fall of 2019 of my design class, my teammates and I focused on streamlining the birth control process for our final project. This project was completed within a timeframe of 10 weeks and involved interviews, ideation, and visual design.

DEFINING THE PROBLEM

Despite being an integral aspect of many women’s lives, birth control packaging remains excessive and complicated. In fact, many of the components in each packages serves mostly to be thrown away: long, confusing walls of text on a huge sheet of instructions, along with blister packaging for the actual pills themselves.

Due to the fact that many of these components are not able to be recycled, my team and I decided to create a solution that was an all-encompassing service for a user’s reproductive health needs that allowed them to track their pill-taking schedule and speak to doctors - all in a recyclable package.

My birth control has terrible packaging - it comes in a big box with pages of information that are useless and foil packets that create so much waste. It really bothers me how much waste I make from the medication every month.

Despite an initial interest in reducing waste for OTC medication, we discovered that many of our female interviewees brought up the problem of unsustainable packaging for birth control.

Through outside research and multiple interviews, we gathered the following common painpoints:

• As college students, many people just didn’t have the money or time to consider waste when buying medication.

• Users stated that their medication options were largely controlled by their insurance.

insight

Users don’t have the luxury of considering packaging waste from the medication their doctors prescribe them.

ideation

With our interviews and insights set as a foundation, my team and I did a round of brain-dumps to look at solutions at all different angles.

In class, we did a few rounds of rapid prototyping.

From there, we synthesized our learnings and tried to address the following:

• Because this is an app for women, we needed to think about how exactly our product could improve their reproductive health needs. It can be very easy to just order birth control every few months and forget about it.

• If we were to deliver this to their door, we also needed to think about reusable boxes.

Thus, we redefined our goals and decided to focus on the entire reproductive health experience for women.

Our solution is a women’s health app with an easy interface to

• manage birth control

• monitor one’s reproductive health

• request birth control refills

Packaged in a reusable container, our solution is free from blistered packaging and excess paper instructions. Medication is delivered to your door and the empty medicine container is picked up and reused for further refills.

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reflections and thoughts

This was the first design class that taught me to think about the product from the business’ point of view and ask the question, “Is this a viable product that would create profit for our business?” While it is critical to design through the users perspective, it is also important to gear solutions towards a strategic design. As designers, we must think about the stakeholders involved in every side of the product.

If we had more time, I believe that creating a prototype of the app would have greatly benefited our product. Not only would it have forced us to think about the best way to display the information, but also allowed us the possibility of making additional adjustments to our solution to be more user-centered.