︎︎︎ Go back to homepage

Design Research and Strategy for Hygienius

Design project done during a Service Design internship at INK social design, Amsterdam

This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

At a glance

Challenge:

Hygienius provides a fully integrated service of high-quality single-use toileting products to care institutions (like hospitals). They aim to provide more humane, hygienic and efficient daily patient care with high infection prevention. 

Hygienius has products that are incrementally innovative and products that are disruptive. Their star product is Poppa: a urinal for women in hospitals. All their individual products fit into their bigger service.

Care institutions showed a lot of interest about Hygienius as a whole and Poppa specifically. However, these insitutions were not actually implementing and using Hygienius.  There was a latent fear around the use of Poppa. How might we modify Hygienius’ strategy and service offering in order to make it’s overall range of products, especially the female urinal Poppa, easy for hospitals to trust and implement?

https://www.hygienius.eu/en

Process followed and my leading contributions:

This project was developed in a lean, agile manner. This means that after every stage, the Hygienius team was consulted and communicated with to co-create the design plan and outputs.

- Kickoff workshops with market researcher and Hygienius team
- Develop insights, assumptions and opportunities from the workshops
- Interviews with care institution stakeholders
- Personas and empathy mapping with a behavioural design lens
- Poppa competitor research
- Hygienius competitor research
- Identify opportunities
- Design a new strategy for Hygienius and alterations in the service design
- Prototyping, UX design and website development

Deliverables:

1. Personas and empathy maps
2. Behavioural design insights
3. Opportunity mapping 
4. New strategy and service proposition
5. UX design:  Hygienius Lab’s website with animations

Dive deep

Context:

Hygienius provides a fully integrated service of high-quality single-use toileting products to care institutions (like hospitals). They aim to provide more humane, hygienic and efficient daily patient care with high infection prevention. 

Hygienius has products that are incrementally innovative and products that are disruptive. All these individual products fit into their bigger service.

(Incremental) Bedpans:

When Hygienius came to INK, Poppa Female Urinal was their hero product. They were championing this very disruptive female urinal along with the rest of the Poppa products. The incremental products like bedpans were secondary.

Care institutions showed a lot of interest about Hygienius as a whole and all the products had been co-created with nurses and patients. However, these insitutions were not actually implementing and using Hygienius. Hygienius then approached a market researcher who found that Poppa Male Urinal was the product with the highest change of implementation followed by Poppa Sick Bag and finally (least of all) Poppa Female Urinal.

But this was still not giving them a solution. They wanted to have Hygienius and its products, especially Poppa Female Urinal, in as many care institutions as possible. What better way to do this than approach a design agency?

Design research objectives:

Primary: Identify the the needs, motivations and cultures of the possible Poppa users.
Secondary: Discover the opportunities for succesful implementation and use of Hygienius as a whole and the single Poppa products.

Process followed:

This project was developed in a lean, agile manner. This means that after every stage, the Hygienius team was consulted and communicated with to co-create the design plan and outputs.

- Kickoff workshops with market researcher and Hygienius team
- Develop insights, assumptions and opportunities from the workshops
- Interviews with care institution stakeholders
- Personas and empathy mapping
- Poppa competitor research
- Hygienius competitor research
- Identify opportunities
- Design a new strategy for Hygienius and alterations in the service design
- Prototyping and website development 

Research:

The research was approached in 2 parts.

After the workshop, what questions do we have about Poppa and what assumptions need to be tested?

After the workshop, what questions do we have about Hygienius and what assumptions need to be tested?

Interviews

Goal:  To understand the patient and nurse experience relating to female urination and explore how Poppa could/should be implemented (enquire about all 3 Poppa products). 

A sample size of 5 was selected for the interviews. Studies have said that this is a “good sample size for qualitative research through in depth interviews”. The samples ranged across different wards and heirarchies in healthcare institutions.

1.  Nurse in General paediatric surgery, adolescents intensive care


2. 6 years Senior Nurse -  Neuromuscular complex care, acute hospital work + Patient with Wilson’s disease - Liver transplant recipient


3. Gynaecology nurse, worked in community hospitals


4. Midwife, worked in anti-natal, pre and post delivery and community nursing


5. Director of Hospital services, Deputy director of nurse, Senior nurse Oncology wards, Oncology nurse for 15 years

Personas and Empathy Mapping

Understanding prime personas and stakeholders allows us to build a hook to make Poppa more likeable and build a succesful brand strategy for Hygienius.

1. General ward nurse who would be slightly skeptical but still enthusiastic to use it



2. A young girl (patient) who would be assumed as the prime early adopter based on the research


3. Nursing director- what would matter to someone from the hospital board?

Poppa competitor research:

1) Aquaeve

2) Go Girl


3) Shewee


4) Pibella


5) The slipper pan

Research conclusions about Poppa:

The market researcher’s insight at the beginning of this project was that Poppa Male Urinal was the product with the highest chance of implementation followed by Poppa Sick Bag and finally (least of all) Poppa Female Urinal. However, our design research found the exact opposite (as you can see in the above images). 

More opportunities:

We identified some more long term opportunities for Hygienius’ products and service (employee culture, customer service)  so they could build a stronger trust with their customers and stakeholders. 


These research outputs paved the way for creating a design strategy for the Hygenius service - a strategy that would enable succesful implementation of Poppa and maximum success for Hygienius. The research also created innovative pathways for developing Poppa further as an independent product.

The Solution:

1. Hygienius launches with its full service offering including only the the incremental products.

2. Poppa technology products are put into a sub-brand under the Hygienius umbrella called Hygienius Labs. The Labs will be projected as an R&D venture to build disruptive products, mainly Poppa Female Urinal.



3. The adopters of Hygienius will be given the chance to become a ‘Poppartner’. This means that the hospital staff can order some Poppas, test them, give Hygienius feedback and help Poppa Female Urinal grow.


4. Since these Poppartners will already have used the Hygienius service with its incremental products, they would have strong trust in Hygienius and hence a less skeptical approach towards Poppa.

5. By onboarding the hospital staff as Poppartners and not as traditional customers whom something is being ‘sold’ to, Poppa and Hygienius Labs get projected as a more authentic service.

6. In terms of the service design, the hospital staff interactions have now moved from the front end customer journey side towards the back end. Here, the hospital staff can be seen as a part of Hygienius.

This design output saw positive feedback from the Hygienius team. Their efforts in developing the most innovative female urinal now see an appropriate pathway to massive success.

Prototyping, website development and delivery:

The above vision and design for the Hygienius service was accepted by the Hygienius team. INK was then given the chance to design a website to communicate this vision appropriately to potential Hygienius customers. I played a role in designing the ‘Lab’ page and created the animations of elements on the Landing page and the How it works page. You can access the website here: https://www.hygienius.eu/en

Learnings:

1. Integrating behavioural research into strategy can create a strong base for success by helping us understand customers’ barriers to adoption better.
2. A disruptive, useful product won’t necessarily be adopted by users.  How we communicate about it, brand and present it is key.
3. There is a difference between a ‘market’ oriented lens and a ‘human’ oriented lens.

︎ Intrigued? Click here to drop me an email.

︎︎︎ Skill Display: Workshop facilitation

︎︎︎ Go back to homepage