Giving Pillsy an industrial design upgrade
A few months ago we were presented with a tough decision; we needed to decide whether or not we should make one more upgrade to the industrial design for Pillsy before locking it down for production. On one hand, we’d been working with a stable design for several month were getting good feedback on the clean aesthetic. On the other hand, we liked our design, but we didn’t love it. And we wanted to love it.
Then we met Dan Clifton of Studio 20 Designs while we were at an event in the HAX space in San Francisco. Dan is a very talented industrial designer, with a track record of leading design for some well-known products, like some of the watches for FitBit. We chatted for a while about whether we should revamp the aesthetics of our design. Dan understood our vision for actually wanting to make Pillsy functionally beautiful, with the need to get to production quickly.
After a week or two of deliberating we decided to take one more shot at perfecting the industrial design with Dan because we wanted Pillsy to be perfect, even though it could set us back a couple more months to our product launch.
Dan went through several design iterations with us. Each design concept was given it’s own name, and we discussed pros and cons. We 3D-printed replicas of our Top 5 designs and put them in front of people to get their feedback. The design we had named “Puff” was the clear winner, with the vast majority of people preferring it to the others.
After another month we had Puff integrated with our previous mechanical design. Previously, I had spent the past two years thinking about pill bottle designs and had reached the point where it seemed like I had considered everything. I had modeled and printed the first several generations of the design myself, spending hundreds of hours trying to nail it. It was amazing to see how bringing in a talented person like Dan, who had a new perspective, could add so much more. Sometimes you need a new perspective.
Later, I saw the new design next to some of our old ones. Even with the same dimensions it looked so much sleeker and smaller, like a product you wanted to put on display. And when you hold it in your hand the balance is perfect too. Even the images don’t really do it justice — you need to see and hold it in person to understand what I mean.
We’re focused on launching the PillsyCap right now but we have already started on some designs for additional products in our connected medication lineup that fit the same design language. Stay tuned to see what’s coming out next.
