MOM TO BE — Dora Saska's folio

PROJECT HIGHLIGHTS

MOM TO BE is a mobile application designed for expectant mothers with the aim to reduce the stress caused by the changed life situation and inaccurate information.

Client: GE Healthcare

Duration: 15 weeks
Team: 4 Designers

My role: Product Designer - UX Research, Concept Development, Prototyping & Testing, Interaction Design

Tools: Figma, Sketch, Invision, Axure, Adobe Suits

CASE STUDY OVERVIEW

Brief

This project was created during an Interaction Design course at MOME (Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design) in collaboration with GE Healthcare, where we were working on solutions that facilitate the lives of different patients.

Our team's brief was to design a mobile application, which helps expectant mothers manage regular care, status reports, and weekly changing tasks.

Problem Statement

Pregnant women tend to be stressed by the big amount of and often inaccurate information rushing at them.

Despite receiving plenty advice from those around them, they often feel by themselves during their pregnancies without real targeted support.

Outcomes

To address these issues, the MOM TO BE application was designed to provide a reliable partner with all the necessary knowledge in one place. The mobile app features three main functionalities:

Pregnancy tracking
Companionship
Mood capturing

Figure 1: Main features of MOM TO BE application

PROCESS

Discover

We started our discovery with Desk research: we have read articles, joined a moms’ group on Facebook and looked up the medical examination during pregnancy. We came upon a study by Swedish midwives Bjelke and Marintsson with staggering statistics:

Following the deep dive process into the topic, we formulated our hypotheses based on which we finally came up with the interview script. We conducted research interviews to validate our assumptions and uncover the pain points of potential users. The interviewees were divided into 3 groups: inexperienced and experienced moms and a midwife as a supporting health professional.

Define

The problem area was mapped within an intensive, multi-day workshop, where we applied different UX methods (e.g. affinity diagram, empathy and journey map, personas, design principles, prototype on paper) to create the concept.

Based on the synthesized information three personas were created:

• Our first persona was a well-prepared mom,

• The second one was Aunt Babi, the lovely midwife,

• The third one is Panna, who was a 22-year-old college student whose pregnancy had not been planned beforehand. We were focusing on Panna as she is in the most critical position and needs the most help.

Figure 2: Our team during the multi-day workshop

Ideate

At the closing of the workshop week, we dedicated a day to evolve our ideas further and created a prototype on paper and the first draft of the screen flows. We made the decision that the most beneficial for our target users would be an application that contains a timeline by which the entire pregnancy can be easily tracked.

Figure 4: The result of the rapid prototyping session

Wireframing & testing

At this point we had begun creating low fidelity wireframes in Axure so that we could validate our concept with usability tests. With the help of a clickable prototype, we tested them with a total 5 of potential users and our mentors. Based on their feedbacks we iterated our design to achieve the following improvements:

Figure 5: Iterations of Lo-Fi wireframes

As we created the screen flows, we thought about how we could guide our users through the screens end-to-end.

Figure 6: Guiding our users through the screens

UI Kit

Before we started to work on our final product, a high fidelity prototype made with Figma, we designed the main graphic elements and put together a UI Kit. We decided on using soothing pastel colors and harmonious gradients for a stress-relieving effect. When the icons were drawn, we strived to make them easy to recognize and distinguish.

Companion character

We were looking for a companion character, so we jumped back to our second persona: Aunt Babi. She was based on one of our interviewees, she is a midwife, who impressed us with her caring attitude. In order to reduce stress we decided to engage emotional design within the application. So Aunt Babi became a guide, who is always ready to help the mom-to-bes out with some hints.

Moody colors

On the first start-up of each day the users can express their current mood which is associated with carefully picked colors. So this way, on the main timeline screen the past days are displayed with various color gradients. This separates the current day from the following ones. At first we used warmer colors for achieving a cheerful effect, but we switched it later. We discovered after the usability tests that it this reddish color reminded the users on failure or error.

Figure 9: Improvement of the Daily mood screen

FINAL PRODUCT

Figure 10: Final design of MOM TO BE application

WHAT WE ARE PROUD OF ✨

Our project, MOM TO BE, was published in the 2017 issue of Made in MOME, which showcases the best works, student and lecturer successes of each year created at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design.