Making a portable chemical lab usable by anyone, anywhere

The Challange

CyanoGuard's CyanoSmart device lets mining sites measure cyanide concentration in water on-site — replacing outsourced lab testing. The catch: the people running it every day are miners, not chemists.

• No lab or chemical background

• Sites scattered globally — high-altitude Peru to remote Australian desert

• Dozens of languages, variable literacy

• Every kit ships with unfamiliar tools: a micropipette, colour-coded vials, custom cartridges, the device itself

Before this system, onboarding meant flying a sales rep to every single site to train miners in person.

The Solution: a multi-touchpoint instructional system

Rather than one manual, the kit teaches through repetition across physical touchpoints — so the same step is reinforced wherever the miner looks.

1. The printed brochure — the first thing opened in the box. Introduces every element in the parcel by name and picture before any instructions begin, so nothing is unfamiliar when the real steps start.

2. Wall posters — the full step-by-step process, illustrated, designed to be pinned up at the test station and referenced mid-process without needing to hold a manual.

3. On-device instructions — the same visual steps carried onto the device itself, for the moment the miner is holding it.

4. The colour-coded system — every vial, cartridge, and concentration range is tied to a colour, not a word. A miner matches colour to colour, regardless of what language the label is printed in.

Flagship: designing from inside the lab

To design instructions that actually held up in the field, I spent over a month working directly alongside CyanoGuard's chemical production team — running the test myself, repeatedly, until I understood exactly where a first-time user would hesitate, mis-step, or lose the thread.

That hands-on time surfaced gaps the process documentation alone never would have — small sequencing issues, moments needing a visual checkpoint rather than a written one, steps that could be safely merged. The instructional system was built to close those gaps, not just illustrate the existing procedure.