Myant - 2020

Designing a smart heat wrap to empower women’s wellness

Bringing together hardware, fashion and digital design to create a seamless pain relief experience.

Project duration

3 months

Team

Product designer (me), UI designers (2), Mechanical engineer, Software developers (2), Fashion designer, Hardware engineer

Context

The Tend Heat Wrap is a co-branded product with Myant’s owned brand, Skiin Connected Life — a garment system that uses sensor-enabled garments to collect biological data. The Tend Heat Control App was embedded within the Skiin Connected Life App, enabling users to manage the heat wrap alongside other connected garments, and to aggregate data into broader health and wellness metrics.

Tend is also a new brand developed by P&G, targeting the fem-tech market with a focus on women’s health and wellness. This collaboration brought together P&G’s brand vision and Myant’s connected garment technology.

My role

I was responsible for the end-to-end experience across both physical and digital touch points:

Led industrial design of the heat wrap and its packaging, including onboarding guides that eased the transition from physical product to digital app control.
Defined and prioritized features and phased releases, ensuring the roadmap balanced user needs with technical feasibility.
Designed the app experience to connect and control the wrap, covering setup, daily use, and aftercare touchpoints.
Collaborated across hardware, software, mechanical, and fashion design teams to ensure a seamless user journey from unboxing to ongoing product care.
Partnered with P&G teams to provide progress updates, present design decisions, and align on direction throughout development.

Problem

Menstrual pain relief products are common in the market, but most provide only basic functionality at lower price points. The challenge was to differentiate the Tend Heat Wrap by delivering a personalized, connected, and user-friendly experience that goes beyond simple heat therapy.

Research & Insights 🔎

1:1 Interviews – Chosen to capture personal stories about menstrual experiences and pain relief methods. This uncovered nuanced pain points and expectations that surveys alone couldn’t reveal.
MVP User Testing – Used a simple prototype app to validate whether users could control heat intuitively. Provided fast feedback on interaction design before full development.
Personas – Built from recurring themes in interviews and testing. Helped the team align on core user goals (productivity, mobility, peace of mind) and guided hardware–software design trade-offs.
Diary Studies – Sent to 20+ participants to observe in-context use over time. Revealed behaviours, lab testing missed, such as sleeping with the wrap, which directly informed features like timers and safety indicators.

Key findings:

Users wanted reassurance the device was working → led to visual heating indicators. Early prototypes revealed delays between the app interface and the physical heat wrap. This taught me to design for feedback transparency — adding visual indicators of heating status so users always knew what was happening, even when the device lagged.
Users valued one-click simplicity → but needed customization for varied cycles. Initial user tests showed high demand for “one-click relief.” But later diary studies revealed that women’s pain patterns varied month to month. This highlighted the need to support both quick preset modes and deep customization, which directly shaped feature prioritization.
A single onboarding flow confused users → tailoring by device type improved clarity. The Skiin ecosystem included multiple sensor garments. A single universal onboarding flow confused users. By tailoring onboarding for each device type (wrap vs. garment), we reduced friction and prevented setup errors.
In-home testing revealed real-life contexts that lab sessions could not. Participants often used the wrap while sleeping or working, when reaching for the device—or even their phone—was inconvenient or undesirable. These insights highlighted the need for safety features and automation, ensuring the wrap could be trusted to manage itself when users couldn’t actively control it. This reinforced the value of remote, real-world testing for products embedded in private daily routines.

Design solution 🎨⚙️

Research insights directly shaped prioritized solutions:

Custom Heat Controls – Sliders + real-time heating indicators to resolve hardware–software sync delays.
Preset Modes – One-click relief combined with deeper customization to balance simplicity and flexibility.
Timer Function – Auto shut-off for safety and convenience, especially overnight.
Session History & Sticky Play Bar – Quick recall of effective sessions and seamless ongoing control.
Embedded App Experience – Integrated into Skiin app to provide device status, battery life, and support multiple devices in the ecosystem.

Impact ✨

By embedding research into every stage of the design, the Tend Heat Wrap became more than a wearable device — it evolved into a connected wellness product. This project demonstrated how thoughtful design across digital and physical experiences can empower women to live life on their terms, even during their period.

Differentiated Tend Heat Wrap from low-cost competitors with premium, connected features.
Improved usability and trust via visual indicators, quick-access controls, and tailored onboarding.
Validated app-based control as a unique selling point, positioning the product as a fem-tech innovation.
Built a foundation for future menstrual wellness insights through features inspired by diary study findings.
Real-world diary testing revealed scenarios like overnight or discreet workplace use, directly shaping safety features and automation to support users when manual control was inconvenient.

Learnings & Next Steps 🎓

Designing clear feedback systems is critical when hardware and software may lag.
User needs evolve - Balancing quick preset simplicity with long-term personalization ensures inclusivity across user needs.
Onboarding across multiple device is not one-size-fits-all - Tailored onboarding reduces friction in ecosystems with multiple devices.
In-context research captures intimate, real-world behaviours essential that we can not captured from lab testing