Measupp
February - April 2023
Group Project · Bachelor Level · Industrial Design Engineering
Course: Designing for Specific Users
This project focused on designing for specific user groups through a human-centred approach. It combined user research, co-design activities, and experiential prototyping to create meaningful, context-aware product concepts. The process involved empathising with users, conducting literature and field research, and iteratively developing personas, storyboards, and low-fidelity prototypes. By integrating problem definition, design, and prototyping from the early stages, the project aimed to deliver concepts that align with user characteristics, needs, and real-world contexts.
Measupp is a wall-mounted detergent dispenser and companion measuring cup, co-designed with a visually impaired woman, to solve a problem from her own daily routine, measuring laundry detergent without being able to see fill lines. Through tactile prototyping and close collaboration with the user, the team arrived at a simple mechanical solution, a knob that dispenses a fixed amount per turn into a purpose-built tactile cup, validated through requirement evaluation and a hands-on use evaluation with the user.
The Challenge
The project began with the objective of designing a product to support a person with a disability in daily life, in collaboration with that individual as a design partner rather than as a passive research subject. The co-designer, is a forty-six-year-old visually impaired woman who presented no obvious point of difficulty at the outset, she was asked to keep a journal of her daily routines in order to map her context and surface points of friction that might otherwise go unremarked. From this contextual mapping emerged the central challenge of accurately measuring detergent for laundry without a reliable means of visual verification. This process also surfaced a clear constraint for the design direction, namely the co-designer's preference for simplicity, favouring a minimal number of controls and steps over additional functionality.
The Co-Design Process
As the co-designer is visually impaired, conventional design tools such as mood boards and rendered visualisations were of limited value, so the process instead centred on in-person sessions where concepts were ideated and translated into low-fidelity prototypes on the spot, using simple materials she could try out and react to immediately, with her feedback feeding directly into the next iteration. She frequently contributed her own input by drawing on objects from her household to communicate preferences regarding texture and form. A notable adaptation arose from scheduling constraints on these in-person sessions, when the team began mailing custom braille paintings of current concepts, inspired by one she had shared earlier, so that feedback could continue between physical meetings.
From Concepts to Final Design
Ideation proceeded along two parallel lines corresponding to the product's two components, a measuring cup usable without sight and a mechanism for dispensing controlled quantities of detergent, converging on three concept directions presented to the co-designer for evaluation, namely a standalone tactile cup, a mechanical dispenser with a rotating knob, and a smart application-connected dispenser with sensors. Given her preference for simplicity, the mechanical dispenser combined with the improved cup was selected for further development. The resulting design, Measupp, comprises a wall-mounted dispenser refilled via a hinged lid, with a transparent reservoir window, fill sensors, and a rotating knob that dispenses a fixed fifteen millilitres of powder per turn with an audible click. Ergonomically, the cup is shaped to fit the average human hand and includes a distinct grip side to indicate scooping orientation by touch, while the dispenser's knob and slot are similarly sized and positioned for comfortable, low-effort operation. The cup itself retains tactile ridges to indicate fill level, a spill-resistant edge, and an anti-roll point, and slides into a dedicated slot beneath the dispenser, while a removable catch tray beneath the slot captures powder dispensed inadvertently. The intended production material is PFA, chosen for its durability and suitability for repeated contact with detergent and water inside the washing machine, with slight flexibility built into the cup to reduce noise during the wash cycle. The full interaction is thus reduced to positioning the cup, rotating the knob, and transferring its contents to the machine, without requiring fine-motor precision.
Use Evaluation
As Measupp was developed for a single user, its evaluation was conducted directly with the co-designer through a qualitative, observation-based study comparing her prior method against the new product, recording structured notes on both practical usability and experiential satisfaction, alongside comparative measures of time, spillage, and steps required. Against the finalised requirements, Measupp satisfied the substantial majority of criteria, including stability, single-handed operability, and adequate fill feedback. A few outcomes merit note, the findability of the cup among laundry was only partially satisfied, its capacity fell short of the specified minimum without affecting practical usability, and silent operation within the machine could not be conclusively verified without a production-material prototype. None of these were considered indicative of a fundamental deficiency, and the project may be regarded as having produced a solution grounded in an authentic user need.
Personal Contributions
Measupp was developed as a collaborative team effort throughout all stages of the project, and my own involvement extended across each phase, with a particular concentration on the analytical dimension, namely translating insights from the co-designer into a formal list of requirements and critically assessing the final design against it. The most significant insight to emerge from this project, for me personally, concerns the distinction between designing for a specific individual and designing for a hypothetical persona, and the experience has reinforced my conviction that direct, sustained engagement with an actual user yields outcomes better suited to genuine need than one informed by an assumed profile.