Toggle: UX meets packaging | Case study

Toggle is just a concept, not a real and delivered product. It’s one of the projects I completed while studying at Product and Communication design at Scuola Italiana Design. The brief lead me to design a new packaging solution for a hypothetical pharmaceutical company, which supposedly sells strange pills that can help people to improve themselves and delete their flaws . Here are the main requirements:

• Find the right naming for the project
• Design a new logo and related brand idenity
• Design new packaging solutions with the user in mind

UX Design process

This project gave me the opportunity to freely design a product while keeping only the user front and center. Ordinary design challenges have stricter terms and many stakeholders involved while this project was just a concept.

This project gave me the opportunity to freely design a product while keeping only the user front and center.

The main focus of the brief was to develop some kind of interesting interactivity for the user, hence I applied the well-known UX design process:

1. Empathize
2. Define
3. Ideate
4. Prototype
5. Test

1. Empathize: what’s wrong with most packaging solutions?

Some surveys were conducted in order to find common teams and pain points shared by many users. All the data was gathered in sticky notes and the analysed to look for teams to develop new problem statements.

"Oh my.. this leaflet. I hate it!"

"How are you supposed to open this box without making everything fall?"

"What does this mean? This is full of boring and pointless text"

"Well, that's hardly readable - that's sooo small!"

2. Define: the main problems with most pharma packagings

All the data was then gathered in the same place to find some common themes. It was immediately clear that some pain points were shared by most users and that it was probably interesting to investigate on these first:

1. Instructions and leaflets are really hard to use, to fold and unfold
2. Information tend to lack structure and, most importantly, hierarchy: everything is on the same level of importance and it’s really hard to rapidly scan the leaflet
3. Boxes are easy but cumbersome to open: as soon as you open bottom lid, everything inside falls if you open the box from the bottom section

3-4. Ideate and Prototype: Toggle

After having defined the main problems the design was trying to solve, I moved to the ideation phase. I had some fun with Crazy Eights, and How Might We. I then screened the solution and focused on the most interesting one: Toggle!

Toggle is a fictitious pharmaceutic company that sells weird pills designed to delete specific patient’s flaws. Toggle provides a new to access the settings page of the patients character: the user can the disable its weaknesses and enhanced his positive characteristics.

Human Interface Guidelines

To create consistency between the main narration and the visual identity of the concept, I applied some of Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines core principles, shifting them from UI to Industrial design. Interaction was made easier, with a single toggle to open the box and easy-to-fold leaflet.

I also tried to find an easier and clearer information architecture for the main advantages and disadvantages of the product, by showing this information in a easy-to-read and hierarchical way on the back of the box.

5. Testing the prototype: what could be better

The last step of the UX Design process is to test and probably iterate on the design. The same users I interviewed in the first part of the project, were contacted again for this step.

The main outcome of this step was the introduction of two paper lids to keep the leaflet in place while opening and closing the box.

What I learned

Toggle gave me the opportunity to learn that UX design is not something confined to the realm of Interaction Design. Its design methods, the focus on empathy and the attention to keeping the user front and center, can be applied to most areas of visual design and industrial design.