Bridge Design

At Bridge we think of design as creating delightfully integrated user experiences rather than just the sum of our disciplines.  When we are fortunate enough to design both hardware and software this is when the best opportunities for creating a seamless experience reveal themselves.  While some clients hire us for only one part of the puzzle we can’t help getting emotionally invested, looking at the big picture and considering how it all fits together. 

Every staff member at Bridge is a relentless champion of the user.  While we’ve spent countless hours in the field on various projects and bring this diverse experience to the table we also recognize every project is different.  Each has its own nuances and we strive to uncover what’s relevant and important to the user so we can do our best to stand in their shoes and design specifically for them.

We ask lots of questions and spend time understanding the problem.   We’ll share our (sometimes unsolicited) observations and ideas even when they’re beyond the project scope.  Over the past two decades we’ve taken lots of products to the market and know the pitfalls to watch out for.   So we’ll raise our hand if we see a better way of doing things.  We’ve built our reputation mostly on repeat business and our clients rely on us to help them through navigate often difficult and conflicting challenges.  We’d like the opportunity to do the same for you. Bridge brings a heart-felt and open-minded creativity to bear on a project’s demands.  Our goal is to design a product that solves the right problems, gracefully meeting our users’ needs and fitting into their world with an ease that makes it, while new, seem familiar and right.

Knowing that your product’s design will have a lot to do with its success, we don’t want to tell you what that design should be.  We want to help your users tell us.  We endorse as much contact with users during a project as possible, and we’re not talking about programmed question sets and scorecard results.  We leave that kind of broader, shallower statistical research for other groups.  It’s about uncovering what’s relevant and important through guided but  real open-minded and open-ended conversation.  The customer empathy borne of this kind of exploration reveals exactly what problems need to be solved, and steers us through the inevitable tradeoffs that design entails.  And beyond the practicality of product definition, meeting potential end users who stand to benefit from your product inspires our team in a way that a dry product specification never could. 

Bridge’s research role includes the following:

•    Helping our client identify the most pressing questions 
•    Oversight of a design effort to create the right tools for research goals
•    Assisting clients in identifying the demographics to pursue 
•    Crafting, managing, and conducting user interviews with consumers and medical professionals
•    Analyzing research results
•    Generally championing an awareness of the market and user perspective throughout the project

We believe industrial design is about crafting the ultimate user experience; it’s about turning technology into objects that delight clients and consumers alike. Our goal is to inspire confidence in your brand through products that are as well-resolved outside as they are inside.

In this increasingly competitive world, design can make or break a product. Our industrial designers’ analytical and creative skills shape the product throughout the iterative process. Design teams often get mired in conflicting demands; we help isolate, prioritize and synthesize those demands, adding value and increasing sales.

Successful products are developed by strong multidisciplinary teams that communicate well; our ID team’s role in your team is to seek feedback and consider its ramifications on design. From early concept development to final details such as color, materials and finish, we have the tools that allow for the crucial examination of ideas.

Bridge keeps our focus on the user when designing a UI. With medical products in our portfolio where quick grasp of an interface is truly a matter of life and death, we understand the importance of reducing cognitive load and we have the chops to do it. 

Making use of both quick-and-dirty tools and increasingly sophisticated interactive prototypes to test ideas with users early and often, our process flows confidently and smoothly from initial design explorations to fully-defined UI specs.   

Bridge’s creative team creates compelling interfaces that give a product winning communication skills and personality. We’re flexible to meet individual project needs, disciplined by understanding of the realities of software programming, and enriched by talented visual design.

Our engineering team is passionate about the whole process of product development. We excel in flexing our creative muscles, then following through with profound attention to detail. We work closely with designers and clients to understand a project’s goals and develop early concepts and breadboard mechanisms. Our understanding of engineering feasibility contributes to the industrial design process; our dedication to good design and usability maintains the integrity of the vision as we move a product into the detailed engineering phases. We work collaboratively with clients and manufacturing partners to choose the appropriate materials and processes to ensure that parts meet performance and cost goals. We believe that regular communication amongst stakeholders helps manage risk. We guide a product all the way through manufacturing and can design functional gages for quality control. 

Our experience runs broad and deep, from low volume biotech instruments to high volume consumer oriented medical devices.  We have developed complex mechanisms for a tissue collection device and produced dramatic cost reduction by redesigning a low volume surgical tool.  We have created a range of quick breadboard mechanisms to show usability methods for an inhaler.  We have defined strict quality control for part production by designing functional gages.  We are adept at taking complete responsibility for the engineering of a product, and we are also very effective at collaborating with our clients’ internal design and engineering teams.

High quality design becomes reality only if properly supported into production. Manufacturing method, production quantity, and location (domestic vs. overseas) are considered during our design process to achieve performance and cost goals. Bridge can assist in all aspects of getting the product off the CAD station and onto the shelf.

We understand the importance of selecting the right vendor partners and incorporating their input. Often it can mean the difference between success and failure, especially with difficult cost, ruggedness, or technical issues.

We follow a design control process. This means we can tell you why something was done, when it was completed, and give you the paperwork to prove it. We design products to meet all relevant standards. Bridge understands the global regulatory environment and can guide you through the approval process maze.