Chilly’s Series 2 — how faulty product design killed the user experience, and how to fix it.

I’ve been a long-time fan of Chilly’s bottles and my bad experience with their latest Series 2 release has forced me to do a small research of Chilly’s product design and user experience, together with some lessons learned and design recommendations for the future. I made everything available below, hope it will help Chilly’s succeed in the next designs.

Personal User Experience

I’d been an extremely satisfied user of Chilly’s Series 1 for the past few years until I lost it while traveling by taxi abroad. Decided to order a new one and was positively surprised that with Series 2, the weak points of first release were mostly improved:

• Shape: from very narrow to more compact while keeping the regular-size drinking collar
• Bottle base: previous one tends to deform after a few free falls resulting in problems with staying upright
• Carry Loop: which was already common among Chilly’s competitors and really missing from V1

When my new V2 500ml arrived, I was already planning to purchase another one in 1000ml size but unfortunately had to pass on that. The new antibacterial collar turned out to be a total disaster in multiple ways:

1. Drinking from the new collar is very hard and may result in spills if a user is not careful enough, this is mostly due to the collar’s mouth-contact surface being too thick/wide.
2. While having the same threading direction as the bottle cap (and no mechanical lock of any kind), the collar randomly screws off together with the cap.
3. Finally drinking through the collar forces you to touch the external surface of it with your lips. Although it’s meant to be antibacterial, it’s known for not being 100% effective against germs, and killing bacteria takes time with this kind of materials. On top of that, in the not-so-sterile environments like gyms, the bottle is moved frequently with dirty hands and no one really wants to touch the external surface of the bottle with one’s lips/mouth.

So although the plastic surface of the collar is nice in touch, I preferred to drink though a metal cuff that is below the collar, unscrewing both at the same time: cap and collar when wanted to take a sip. However, it forced me to be mindful about grabbing both elements firmly when opening the bottle. Otherwise, I never knew which thread would come off first.

Having all of the above in mind I made a simple product hack of gluing the collar and cap together so now I’m sure that both will always unscrew together too:

At the same time, I was wondering if anyone else had the same experience with V2 which got me to the next part of this research: 3’rd party UX.

3’rd party UX

I decided to research other people’s experiences with Chilly’s Series 2 and their findings were very similar to mine, here are just few of them:

“Was so excited by the series 2 design (aesthetics, handle, silicon base) but similar to other reviews actually drinking from it is totally impractical. The collar screws off as you attempt to open it and the collar is not comfortable to drink from, I’ve spilt water on myself twice using just for the first time today.”

“The series 2 lured me in. I even read the reviews and saw people moaning about the collar and didn’t believe it. The collar regularly unscrews alongside the lid during everyday use which I find incredibly irritating. You have to hold the collar in place to avoid this, which is uncomfortable. Overall the design is not practical.”

And while some people found collar’s nice and soft surface positively surprising, it was in great amount overshadowed by the poor drinking experience caused by the collar design.

Summing up the UX research, the main observations were:

1. Collar screwing off together with the cap (EXTREMELY COMMON)
2. Uncomfortable drinking due to the collar design (COMMON).
3. Nice and soft surface of the collar (RARE).

A bonus part of this research, which I really couldn’t verify myself, was related to the Chilly’s Cup:

• leaking of the lids (VERY COMMON),
• temperature dropping rapidly (RARE).

Possible Design Fixes

What are the possible solutions for the problem? Considering current issues with Chilly’s Series 2, designers should focus on:

1. Changing the shape of the antibacterial collar, so it prevents spills while keeping its contact surface protected from the external environment when a bottle is closed.
2. Changing the assembly mechanism of the antibacterial collar, so it stays changeable but doesn’t move together with the cap. Thighs like plug-in connectors can be implemented for that.

However, a separate case be made about completely abandoning the antibacterial collar and coming back to a metal-made one hidden under the cap. In this case, Chilly’s should think of different ways to differentiate itself from competitors. This, among others, includes ideas like:

• Integrated (optional) water filters
• Additional accessories: bike mounts, spin-on drip coffee maker etc.
• Original surface finishes like Raptor Paint etc.

Additionally, an interesting point can be made about fixing Series 2 and making current users happier. Considering that Chilly’s Series 2 is fully functional without the new collar, a new integrated cap may be a complete solution to all of the problems connected to antibacterial one:

*Pardon my poor graphic design skills.

Those new integrated caps can come in nice anodized colors making Series 2 fun and usable again:

Lesson Learned

“How did Chilly’s Series 2 end with such poor design?” — that was my thought after using Series 2 for the first time. It was even more surprising knowing that the results of physical product design, in comparison to IT product design, are much more critical for the company’s future. And sometimes even the company’s survival.

Manufacturing of physical products is resource & time-intensive, and a majority of errors made during the design phase are hardly reversible during the next phases. That’s why physical product design should be a very careful process consisting of multiple iterations of design-prototype-test-feedback loops. Simple as that.

Hard to determine what didn’t play well at Chilly’s without insider knowledge but a few of the possible causes that come to my mind could’ve been:

• Lack of Product Manager position connecting all the dots: designers, testers, manufacturers, customer service and management (Design Lead might not be enough for this),
• No testing phase within product design iterations, or feedback loop errors,
• Bad design decision making.

If any of the above happened, should be a lesson learned for the development process of Chilly’s Series 3.

Closing Thoughts

Although with Series 2, Chilly’s suffered a serious setback, it shouldn’t prevent learning from past mistakes.

By retrospecting on the Series 2 design process, Chilly’s can find out what went wrong and how not to repeat errors of the past, and that might be the single most important element of developing Series 3 that will leave the competition behind.

And it can still easily fix the flaws of Series 2 with a new and creative integrated cap design.

Hope this research was helpful for Chillys, or other reusable bottle producers. If you have more questions or want to get in touch to discuss those ideas further, here’s where you can find me:

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bkordzinski/

Mail: bkordzinski@gmail.com