Plus is an ovulation and pregnancy testing product/service that offers a better user experience and a sustainable alternative to existing products on the market. The vast majority of testing kits use multiple types of plastic and even digital components for a single product, creating approximately 2 million pounds of plastic waste every year in the US. With more women postponing marriage and pregnancy later in life, a well-planned preparation and reliance on ovulation and pregnancy testing is becoming more important than ever. Plus is a better design solution that offers a supportive and smooth pre-pregnancy journey while minimizing material use as much as possible.

Plus is an ovulation and pregnancy testing product/service that offers a better user experience and a sustainable alternative to existing products on the market. The vast majority of testing kits use multiple types of plastic and even digital components for a single product, creating approximately 2 million pounds of plastic waste every year in the US. With more women postponing marriage and pregnancy later in life, a well-planned preparation and reliance on ovulation and pregnancy testing is becoming more important than ever. Plus is a better design solution that offers a supportive and smooth pre-pregnancy journey while minimizing material use as much as possible.

Target Audience

Millennials (between mid 20s - 40s) are the next generation of parents. While they look to products that can simplify their busy lives, they are also highly aware of the global impact of wasteful products that use too much material and too much plastic. Millenials are more willing to support the brand with sustainability consciousness, than just convenience or lower cost.

Design Research

Most of the current fertility testing brands completely ignore environmental impact. There are two major types of testing products: testing strips and testing sticks. Testing strips are thin-cut plastic slices that dip into a urine cup for the result. Testing sticks use a whole plastic case to cover the strip inside, so that users can simply hold it and capture the mid-stream urine. Some even use a digital screen to show the result. Many brands create a fake illusion to make testing sticks be more accurate than strips, which encourages users to buy more expensive sticks and create more plastic, and even worse - electronic waste.Almost all of these testing products are 99% accurate, so brands need to think of new ways to make themselves stand out from competitors. They attempt to compete with claims such as faster testing speed, encourage unnecessary testing frequency, or offer seemingly high-tech digital screens (which contain a battery and all sorts of electronics to simply help read the result). Yet consumers can't really tell the difference between one product and another by simply looking at their boxes on the shelf.After interviewing fertility doctors, we realized that the principle and function for all of these products are the same. There is definitely no functional need for a single-use digital screen to simply tell you a result that most people can read by themselves, and there is no need to make multiple tests for the same result.Thus, there is a huge opportunity to use sustainability as a brand differentiator to help millennial moms to become parents while having less impact on the environment.

Current Issues

1) Overused plasticSuch a simple product is using multiple kinds of plastic. These testing kits are considered as medical products, so they cannot be recycled or reused. Unfortunately they all end up into the landfill after only 5-minute use. So compared to other products being used for years, even though a testing strip is small, its environmental impact is relatively high.

2) Unused leftover products.Preparation for pregnancy sometimes takes years. For the sake of convenience, hopeful mothers-to-be usually stockpile a large amount of testing strips and use them continuously until they test positive for pregnancy. No one really knows when they will get the good news - it could be a month, several months or even years. Usually there will be some unused leftovers within their kit. Since it's such a personal product, it's almost impossible to give them away or put them on eBay for sale, which leads to more plastic waste than needed.

3) Hygienic problems from unsealed urine cupsUrine cups usually are not included in the testing kit, and sometimes they are just randomly placed in the delivery box being sent to the users compared to the overly packaged strips. Nothing protects them from getting contaminated.

4) Ergonomic problems from urine cup handlesIt's extremely hard to hold the urine cup in the middle of a stream without one's hands getting dirty, since the provided handles of the cups are so short. In order to get the right angle for holding enough urine, one has to bend their wrist to an extremely uncomfortable position. These factors all make the testing process uncomfortable and unpleasant.

5) Inconsistent tracking resultsTo identify the peak of ovulation, one needs to keep tracking the status everyday for almost a week. The traditional method of tracking is to use a piece of paper and stick all the used ovulation strips in chronological order and then manually find out the day that has the darkest double lines. This is neither hygienic nor accurate.

Benefits to Users

1) Hygienic packagingBy combining the urine cup and primary packaging, the urine cup is completely sealed.

2) ErgonomicLonger handle allows users to hold the cup more comfortably, which also reduces the chance of directly urinating on one's hand.

3) Easy usagePlus simplifies the testing steps. Users do not need to hold the stick and match the liquid level to the maximum line.

4) Consistent trackingTaking pictures against a high contrast background color enables users to track the result more consistently and accurately.

Strategies for Sustainability

We designed Plus to tackle all the above problems.

1) Reduce overall plastic use for the productConsidering the fact that it only takes 5 seconds for a strip to absorb enough urine for testing, there is really no need to have a plastic urine cup to hold the urine, so we decided to make the cup and primary packaging cellulose-based materials and the strip bio-based plastic.

2) Reduce waste from unused product with on-demand orderingBased on the pattern of women's menstrual cycles, one only needs to track ovulation records between certain days, so we designed our products as monthly supply kits containing 7 ovulation tests and 2 pregnancy tests. Together with a smartphone app that uses a camera and calendar tracking function, users can get more scientific instructions on when to start the test. If they don't get pregnant this month, users can simply order the next month's supply through the app. The Plus system delivers testing kits to our users "just-in-time" on an as-needed basis, minimizing the waste of unused kits.

3) Minimize materialSince the product is technically a medical device that cannot be reused or recycled, we decided to use as little material as possible to reduce the environmental impact. This is accomplished by adding product functionality to both the primary and secondary packaging, beyond the traditional role of merely protecting the testing kit and keeping it sanitary. Furthermore, the entire testing kit is designed to pack flat in order to minimize shipping space and maximize efficiency.

Brand Language

Nurturing a baby is such a powerful thing for a woman, so we chose a color combination of bright purple, yellow and pink to express that feeling. The Plus logo is an abstraction of a bow knot, which represents a gift, not only for the parents-to-be, but also for the environment as well. We wanted to use the whole design - product, packaging, user experience and branding - to express the core ideas of our project - "Plus is a gift for you and the next generation."