Overview

The healthcare industry is currently being revolutionized by wearable technologies. In this concept project, I created an accompanying mobile app that helps expecting-mothers ensure their baby’s wellbeing during pregnancy.

Problem

The pregnancy journey is handle through traditional methods akin to a semi-cookie cutter approach. A common theme of expecting mothers is an uncertainty around the unknowns that come with being pregnant such as fetal health, their own health, and the overall outcome. Complications arise during this 9-month period and maybe formulating connections regarding the fetal's heart rate & movement and a mother's daily activities could save a life or help facilitate a safer, healthier pregnancy.

Solution

Every woman is different and so is their pregnancy, so let's help each unique pregnancy make the unknown known. I created an app to help expecting-mother's monitor their baby's movements & heart rate, monitor the mother's glucose levels, track mother's contractions, stay up-to-date with latest trending articles and questions, and quickly send data updates to their medical professional. This was driven by user research/synthesis, strong brand ideation, and iteration.

‍

‍

Process

1. Research & Synthesis  
2. Information Architecture
3. Interaction Design
4. Prototyping & Testing
5. Iteration
6. Branding & UI Design

‍
1. Research & Synthesis

I started this project with forgoing secondary research, because this is a startup idea and I could not find any similar competitors.

I proceeded to conduct primary research to gain insight into what my target audience. My goal was to better understand what customers want built, how it should behave, appealing messaging & styling, and what makes them continue to use and be excited about when interacting with the brand and app.
‍
I conducted a survey and user interviews. I chose to conduct a survey and user interviews, to understand market demographics and to understand how my potential users think, respectfully.

‍

SURVEY FINDINGS

- 30 respondents (ages 25 - 40 years old)
- Wearable technology needs to be minimally intrusive to wear, as to not alter with the person's daily activities
- Trustability and dependability ranked the highest importance to customers
- Concise messaging is important to customers
- Most common methods of researching pregnancy related questions was through talking to their doctor, friends & family, and searching on Google

INTERVIEW FINDINGS

- 5 adults (5 females, 22-34 years old)
- Pregnancy tends to be highly intimidating to first-time mothers, mainly due to their changing bodies and lifestyle
- First-time mothers are highly concerned with miscarriage because their is a 25% chance of it occurring
- They are also concerned with fetal birth defects
- They are highly concerned with how to approach their diets, supplements, and traveling
- A common theme is uncertainty around the unknowns that come with being pregnant such as fetal health, their own health, the overall outcome, and weight gain.

‍

Following the research, I synthesized my research findings in order to better understand users and their problems. I examined my observations and findings to develop a user persona and an empathy map to summarize and communicate all my research findings in a human-centered way.

‍

‍

With a clear understanding of the user's goals, I made a list of the business goals and intersected the two to find crossovers, because it's important to identify these goals and keep them in mind as I moved on to ideation and design phases.

‍

‍

‍

2. Information Architecture

With a better understanding of the problems that needed solving, I generated ideas and potential solutions that would meet both user and business needs. Based on my research and synthesis, I choose to focus on three key objectives: monitoring the fetal's movements (this includes it's kicks and heart rate), monitoring the mother's blood glucose levels, and creating an information network eco-space.

Monitoring the fetal's movements is the key aspect in creating this app, because the app can help mother's monitor what cannot be seen and sometimes what cannot be felt. Emergency alerts as well provide another layer of protection against unforeseen fetal events.

Monitoring the mother's blood glucose levels include adding and tagging daily events, such as meals, workouts, & mediations to see how these events affect their pregnancy. Correlations between these events and fetal health can be unearthed, thus providing a holistic insight into the uniqueness of pregnancy.

Creating an information network eco-space will help mother's stay up-to-date with trending questions and articles, thus helping find answers to pregnancy related questions & concerns.

I started by creating a feature’s roadmap to help identify most important features to include in the MVP. I then created three key task flows to illustrate the alternative paths, key user actions, and decision points.

‍

‍

I proceeded to conduct a remote open card sort with 10 participants to gain a better understanding of how users would categorize services and features. This led to me designing a high-level app map for the application’s information architecture.

‍

3. Interaction Design

After defining the key pages and their content flows, I did some initial wireframing exploring layouts for the homepage, movement page, blood page, and potentially a contraction's page.

‍

‍

‍

4. Prototyping & Testing

I created a low-fidelity prototype of the wireframes, wrote up a usability test plan, and ran usability testing on the prototype to ‍ with users before proceeding to branding and UI design. I wanted to test if my decisions around architecture and interactions would be easy for mother's to use.

‍

OBJECTIVES

1. Being able to track the fetus's heart rate & movements is the app's number one business objective.
2. Being able to monitor the mother's blood glucose levels allows the app to help the mother see how her daily events affect her fetus.
3. Being able to easily and quickly onboard onto the  app, while still gathering enough data to provide the best user experience.

TASKS

1. Be able to maneuver and easily understand the movement page.
2. Be able to maneuver and easily understand the blood page.
3. Achieve an efficient, yet comprehensive app onboarding process.

QUANTITATIVE RESULT

I had 5 participants test the prototype. All tasks had a 100% completion rate, and the error-free rates for tasks 1 through 3 were 67% (2 out of 3), 67% (2 out of 3), 100% (3 out of 3), 100% (3 out of 3), and 100% (3 out of 3), respectively. My testers struggled with accessing their saved articles and marked events. This was due to the architecture placement of those features. I needed to rethink where I should properly place those features.

QUALITATIVE RESULTS

After conducting one-on-one sessions, I noticed interactions that users found tiring, such as the long onboarding process for signing up for the app. I gathered and organized several pages of qualitative findings in an affinity map to visually group and prioritize similar observations and feedback in a way that would help me zero in on the priority revisions intended to improve usability and the overall user experience.

‍

5. Iteration & Implementation

I iterated and implemented revisions gathered from the testing, resulting in updated wireframes and moved to branding & UI design. Due to a tight deadline, I wasn’t able to run another round of testing otherwise I would’ve tested 5 more participants after the branding phase to learn and iterate more until achieving maximal results.

‍

6. Branding & UI Design

After testing, I designed Baby’s brand identity based on the company’s core values. I created a mood board on Miro that reflected a number of brand adjectives I identified, such as brave, clean, and jolly.

‍

‍

Baby’s logo design process began with sketching to try and find the best fit for the brand identity. With the visual styles defined, I applied these UI design choices to the wireframes, creating high-fidelity UI designed prototypes. To increase productivity and communication between me and the developers, I made a UI kit with all UI components and styles I used.

‍

‍

Conclusion

‍

WHAT I DID

- Primary research
- Information architecture
- Wireframing & interaction design
- Prototyping & testing
- Iteration & implementation
- Branding & UI design

WHAT I DIDN'T DO

- Run multiple, 5 participate, rounds of usability testing
- Conducted A/B testing
- Expand upon the contraction's feature
- Re-test the updated hi-fi prototype
- Build the application

NEXT STEPS

- More usability testing and iteration
- Design stretch features of the application and dive deeper into existing features
- Work with developers to build and launch the application

‍

User Flows: