The client came to us with a breathing trainer scoped as a full medical device program from day one. Three days into a kickoff workshop, with design, engineering, regulatory, and manufacturing people all in the same room, it became clear that path was too slow for what the company actually needed.

So we changed the plan. Launch fast as a wellness product now, but build it well enough that moving into medical device territory later wouldn’t mean starting over.

Eight months after that workshop, the product shipped. A modular, manufacturable device, with the regulatory groundwork already sitting in the drawer for whichever future the company chose.

The brief was blunt. Build a device that felt safe to carry and was hard to use wrong, even for someone who’d never seen it before. That last part mattered most. In an emergency, whoever’s holding it might be a trained nurse, or it might be a stranger who just watched someone collapse.

We built the industrial design around a handful of small decisions that carry most of the weight. A light grey body with a satin finish that reads as calm rather than clinical. A glossy needle shield that visually tells you not to touch it. A semi-transparent safety cap shaped to hint at what’s underneath before anyone’s even read the label.

In the first formative usability study, every test participant identified and used the device correctly. Same in the summative evaluation. The client told us afterward they hadn’t seen a result that clean in decades of MedTech development.

The client needed a feed system built for scale, not just for function on a bench somewhere. We analyzed the existing setup, redesigned it, and re-engineered the construction from the ground up.

A 25% reduction in cost price, along with a cleaner, more functional design. The same job, done for less, and it looks better doing it.

Patients kept missing a step and not getting their full dose. We rebuilt the secondary packaging from scratch, and tested something simple first: could a plain box, no text, no icons, guide someone through correct use just by its shape and the way the parts sat inside it?

It could. Once we layered graphics and instructions on top of that structural foundation, testing with real patients hit full compliance.

Nobody skipped a step.

The client needed to know fast which of several product directions was worth funding. We ran the full scoping process, market analysis, user research, concept generation, evaluation, and an early usability read, in five weeks, and handed over a decision paper with three shortlisted concepts, each with its own manufacturability notes and a rough cost and timeline estimate.

Long before the Napkin Protocol had a name, this is what it looked like in practice. Get everything on the table, then narrow it down on evidence instead of opinion. Today, this exact engagement is a product: The Concept Decision Sprint →

The brief covered the whole platform at once: the physical device, its packaging, the electronics inside it, and the companion app that ties it all together. We led user-centered design across all four. It launched in 2022 and later picked up multiple recognitions for its design.

The hard part was never any single piece of it. It was making sure the device, the box it shipped in, and the screen in someone’s hand all told the same story.