Overview

We developed a FemCare consumer product for P&G that prioritized comfort and discretion. Following our final project deliverable, we were selected to receive an IP Award for our designs. P&G has secured Intellectual Property rights for the design concepts, and due to an NDA agreement, we are unable to share the detailed specifics of our design process.

Understand

In order to understand what women value in their feminine care products, we followed a user-centered approach involving interviews, surveys, and focus groups.

Interviews and Surveys

We conducted interviews and surveys with 30 women between the ages of 18 and 53 to understand why they initially adopted certain brands, who influenced their decisions, and how they feel using their current brand. 

Focus Groups

We also conducted three hour-long focus groups to better understand how women's perceptions of feminine care products. To encourage participants to share their opinions, we had them interact with different physical concepts that characterized key product values.  Participants were also given the opportunity to sketch out and describe their ideal product. We found focus groups to be particularly useful because participants were much more open and comfortable speaking about their feminine care product experiences when they could participate in the session with a female friend.

Insights

Following user research, we identified two primary values that were particularly important for women when using feminine care products. We chose to focus on designing around these two values moving forward.

Create

Informed by our user research, we decided to design a feminine care product that represented the two primary values identified through user research. We ideated over 80 ideas around these two primary values and clustered them together into four themes. Each theme informed the design of a concept, which we sketched and physically prototyped. 

Test

We performed user testing of our prototypes through a series of focus groups. User testing helped us identify which ideas were most promising. 

Focus Groups

During focus group testing, we asked participants to perform "think-alouds" where they described what they were thinking as they interacted with each prototype. Each prototype was presented with minimal description to allow participants to make sense of how they thought the prototypes worked and what they accomplished well or not well. Following the presentation of each prototype, we debriefed participants on what we were hoping to achieve and asked for further feedback. Following user testing, we synthesized our findings and evaluated how each prototype addressed specific user needs.
When presenting our work to P&G, we were able to explain the pro's and con's of each design idea backed through both qualitative and quantitative data. Following our final presentation, P&G decided to purchase the IP to at least one of our design ideas. 

The Team

I was fortunate to work with students from Northwestern's Engineering Design and Innovation (EDI) Masters Program. This project was for the EDI human-centered design project course (Fall 2011). 

From Left to Right: Anthony Jakubiak (Senior Experience Designer - SAP Labs), Me (PhD Candidate - Northwestern's Segal Design Institute), Alexis Valasek (Design Researcher - Motorola Mobility), Tyler Hagan.