Overview
Gifted Mom is a startup based in Yaoundé in Cameroon that has been working to reduce the mortality rate during pregnancies in rural areas. They send SMS messages to pregnant women during milestones in their pregnancies, reminders for appointments, and doctor's recommendations.
Their new goal was to provide young women living in cities with a solution to the unique set of challenges they face from early pregnancy through birth.
My Role: UX Designer
Research, facilitate workshops, prototyping, and visual design.
Tools
Milanote | Google forms | Miro
Adobe XD | Adobe Illustrator
Problem
Many pregnant women in Subsaharan Cities do not get adequate antenatal care.
This leads to a very high rate of infant mortality and near-term birth complications.
These outcomes, especially with first-time pregnancies are avoidable and/or treatable with proper antenatal care.
Solution
Gifted Mom is a mobile app that acts as a personal companion and guides pregnant and nursing women through pregnancy and after childbirth.
It advises them on what to expect at each stage, what is normal what is not, and recommended actions.
It also provides a social platform where women can share their experiences and get specific advice from doctors who act as moderators of the conversations.
Process
Research and Discovery
Analysis of healthcare data.
Interviews with Doctors and Midwives
Surveys
User interviews
Competitive Analysis
Define
Persona
Hypothesis
Ideation
Journey Map
HMWs
Brainstorming
Card sorting
Sketches
Prototyping and Testing
Lo- Fi mockups
Ui- Flows
Usability Testing
Visual Design
Research and Discovery
Analyzing the Data
The Gifted Mom team had done some market research and curated some relevant statistics from which I extracted useful information to help me begin to frame the problem.
SME Interviews
My first step was to organize a facilitated brainstorming session with the stakeholders most of whom happened to be Doctors (SMEs). I also invited a nurse and a midwife whom I understand have more interactions with pregnant women than the doctors.
What we need to know
What are the major concerns that women have when they get pregnant for the first time
What are the changes to their lifestyles
What apps are they using and what can we learn from them?
what are their habits wrt to phones and technology?
where are they currently getting the advice and important information?
How are they currently solving or managing problems related to pregnancy
Why are pregnant women not getting the care they need during pregnancy?
What challenges are they facing? How big a problem is it?
Surveys
To obtain more insight and a better understanding of the problem, I created a survey and sent it out a survey.
I also intended to run some interviews later, so I included some questions in the surveys to enable me to vet ideal candidates for interviews.
So targeted Facebook and Whatsapp groups with women aged 18 to 40. Initially, we didn't get much traction, and also many respondents were abandoning the forms halfway through.
After some brainstorming, we decided to target Whatsapp group admins and other social media influencers and paid them per respondent. We also shortened the form and made mostly MCQ questions.
Talking to the Users
From the respondents in the survey who had opted in, we invited those who met our criteria to the office for the interview. 5 currently pregnant and 3 mothers who nursing mothers.
Since I was remote from the team, the COO Dr. Agbor set up a video call and he facilitated the process.
Considerations
it was critical that the interviewers feel relaxed and not daunted by the video interview and the office setting.
3. Competitive Analysis - Opportunities to create value.
From the surveys, I understood that a majority of these women were already using some other sources to get the information they needed. So I analyzed the most common tools mentioned and compared them to find opportunities for design.
Design Opportunities
We also identified some low effort solutions key features that could be quick wins.
Defining the Problem
Framing the Problem
Hypothesis
By providing these women with the information they need at the right time, they will take the advisable actions that will lead to successful pregnancies and healthy children in the first 5 years.
We will know this works when women
- engage with the app routinely,
- follow the advice provided,
- increase antenatal visits.
- Improvement in the health of babies and moms who use the app.
User Persona
Ideation
Brainstorming
Currently, most women rely on friends and family for advice on what to do when faced with the mental and physical challenges that come with pregnancy.
How might we provide a means for these young women to get relevant information quickly, to help them make reasonable decisions that will ensure they go through successful pregnancies to birth?
Card Sort
To confirm design proposals and to establish some hierarchy of needs that could inform the information architecture, I organized a card sorting exercise with 2 pregnant women and 3 middle age mothers.
Big Idea
To keep the women engaged everyday on the app, we strongly focused on empathy. These women need to feel like someone was listening to them every day. So we came up with a health check, which prompted the user to enter how they were feeling that day, and based on their input, the results will be changed to match their mood.
Sketching
With all the information provided put together some all sketches from the team members and sketched some initial solutions.
Sketches
Prototyping
Design Considerations
Include need for info to fit context.
need for social connection since they trust experiences from others who've been through it,
the need for rapid feedback from doctors.
Content Strategy
Limit access to information to enhance engagement. Gifted mom is not Wikipedia
Controlled release of information to enhance create suspense and enhance engagement. Too much information is not actionable. Provide only information relevant to the week or stage of pregnancy.
Given that the app was going to be content-rich, we need to create some standards that will allow the team to quickly source and format content to fit the app.
User Flows
Describe Key User flows
Ui flow
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Key Flows
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Wire Frame
wireframes
Wireframes**
Visual Design
Prototype
low fi prototype
Key Features.
- UIs and descriptions.
Provide information and symptoms of each stage in an intuitive way that matched their context
Let the woman track her pregnancy progress and approach of her due date.
Prompted the women to self assess and record their changes in symptoms, mood and experiences everyday
Provide a social platform to connect with other women going through similar stages, worries, tips exchange tips
Let them quickly connect to Doctors quickly
Let's Doctors join the ongoing conversations and provide insights tips and correct wrong advice.
Prototype link
Screens layout
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The pivot
As the users engaged the doctors on the app, a pattern emerged. This confirmed what we had suspected earlier. Access to the right doctors was a bigger problem than information.
Most hospitals, especially public hospitals provide inadequate care and the women are often unsatisfied. The few places that provided excellent care tend to charge very high prices for the elite.
We also realized that there was a gap between some hospitals that provided good healthcare but had difficulties managing appointments and attracting
The problem
1. Women have difficulty finding the right care for their pregnancy.
2. Pregnant women have difficulty finding quality care at an affordable price.
3. Pregnant women have a very long wait time to access care.
Top 3 Problem hypotheses
1. Service providers have difficulties driving demand to their clinics/hospitals/labs.
2. Service providers (hospitals, labs, clinics) have difficulties managing scheduled appointments
HMWS.
hmws
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Solutions
Extension to main app.
Eventually we decided that rather than build and app with duplicate features, we would just make an extension to the current up. so we had this new feature as an opt in on the main app.
Sketches***
-- show sign up screen and on dashboard.
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solutions --
Impact.
The app was so succesful that gifted mom later pivoted into a for profit company (Dashlane)
They got accepted into a top accelerator and ...
Challenges & Learnings
Working remotely was very challenging and interviewing was not as easy as could be.
Our initial survey wasn't getting the feedback from which we could easily synthesize findings. I had to revise and reduce the number of questions. It was also very daunting to get useful data out of many non mcq questioins.
It was very obvious from the results that 95% of users had android phones and 5% had iphones. I had problems representing these into one persona intitially but eventually i decided to create 2 proto- personas. Eventually we decided to focus on the larger segment represented by the first persona. We realized that women with higher purchasing power had a unique set of challenges. This led us to miss the opportunity to learn early what would eventually be our biggest finding; that there was a huge opportuinity in providing affordable health care with a good experience.