Catch
Team of 3
September 2019 - May 2020
Designing for Athletes Who Menstruate
How does one design a better period experience for varsity college athletes who menstruate? My capstone project for the University of Pennsylvania’s MSE of Integrated Product Design program seeks to answer this question through a deep understanding of our stakeholders in combination with a view of the larger feminine hygiene and femtech landscape.
User Research
We met with dozens of current and former athletes in-person and via Skype and phone calls, and conducted a number of focus groups with members of varsity and club women’s teams. We also met with administrative stakeholders across several departments at Penn to understand the facilities these athletes operate in and the larger ecosystem that provides varsity athletes with gear they need to perform their best.
Athletes have many of the same worries as others who menstruate:
Leakage, or failure of product
Increased mental burden by having to remember to pack products on game days or for practice
Timing their product changes and symptom treatments precisely in the lead-up to games to avoid “disaster"
Ideation
Initially, we explored feminine hygiene product availability with the goal of bringing products to the spaces athletes inhabit. After several rounds of progressively higher fidelity prototypes, we realized we weren’t addressing any of the fundamental problems we identified in our research. While we were tackling a larger societal issue around period norms, we missed an opportunity to improve the actual products that athletes use to avoid, in their words, “disaster.” After a semester spent honing in toward one idea, we needed to crack open our assumptions and fall back to our core insights about athletes who menstruate.
We jumpstarted our pivoting effort with an ideation sprint. Over 7 days, we collectively generated hundreds of ideas. Some of my more refined sketches are shown below.
After analyzing trends in our ideation and concept refinement sketches, as well as larger market patterns in the feminine hygiene space, the team coalesced around improving the menstrual cup. We identified the menstrual cup as a product that could solve a number of the challenges that menstruating athletes face, yet none of the athletes we’d interviewed so far had used one. Why?
The problem had to be some combination of awareness, perception, education, or usage.
Concept Refinement
To better understand the flaws of current menstrual cup offerings, we surveyed hundreds of people and combed through both quantitative and qualitative data. As it turns out, menstrual cups are known to many college-aged menstruating people. This made the relatively low adoption rate of cups even more puzzling.
Perceptions of those who have never tried and the challenges of first-timers centered around:
Difficulty of insertion
Potential for messy removals
Anxiety around using and cleaning the product in a public restroom.
“Disaster” strikes…
We happily sent off a number of files for 3D printing over Spring Break, ready to explore shape and size variations, varying wall thicknesses for ease of folding and removal, leak/drip protection, and grip mechanics. Unfortunately, this was in March 2020. Like everyone else, we adapted to the move to remote learning during a long isolation period.
Prototyping
During the initial prototyping phase before our pivot, I drove the creation of a physical prototype including the housing, mechanism, and electronics. In the second round, I assisted with material selection and medical research which drove our menstrual cup designs. I also produced an FEA study of one of our final designs, which had six variations for length and diameter, to explore how it performed and folded for a load applied to either its shorter axis. Mimicking the pressure that would be applied by a finger as the user’s hand folded the cup indicated how our design would fold if we had the opportunity to make a physical prototype.
Financial Forecasting
While my teammate drove the second round of prototyping and product design, I owned the financial modelling for our hypothetical startup. Using market research across both the menstrual cup and overall feminine hygiene space, as well as comparable D2C startups, I created a comprehensive forecast of our revenue and profit over a five year period.
