3 min read
This project focuses on helping mothers who are suffering from postpartum depression (PPD). It offers a series of PPD classes , and mothers can learn about infant behavior and how to interact with their babies from them. As a result, mothers can develop a close bond with their babies and improve their mental health.
Why? Nowadays, 1 in 7 women may experience PPD within a year of giving birth. (JAMA Psychiatry, 2013). And one of the PPD symptoms is difficulty bonding with their baby. However, there is no software in app stores to teach mothers with PPD how to bond with their babies to improve their mental health.
Client-based | Academic
Four weeks (40 hours)| 2021
One Project manager, One product manager, Three UX designers
Research, Visual System, Feature/flows, Prototype
HMW provide a flexible and enjoyable learning process for mom with ppd?
Before we started the project, the company had already designed a version of prototype. But due to the existing one lacks attraction for users, the company wanted us to redesign another version as a comparison.
1. A better visual effects and user experience to increase the number of new users.
2. Add extra values to increase the user stickiness of the product.
1. Time Limited/Four-week internship
2. Limited access to lessons content
3. Budget limited
4. No user interview resource
After analyzing the user pain points of the existing prototype through the journey map(displayed in the Design Process section below), we decided to increase the learning enjoyment and improve the user experience in the following four areas:
Why? Shorten the onboarding process because the function of recording mood is not part of MVP (Effert/Impact metric), and excessively long signup process can lead to user churn.
Why? A dynamic learning process that allows users to more quickly find recently learned content and flip through past content.
Why? A more friendly, warm visual effect can make the user's feel enjoyable and interested, which in turn increases their stickiness.
Focus group test result (4 Participants)
6 min read
Secondary Research
Competitive audit
Secondary Research
(7YouTube videos and 5+ online articles)
Considering budget and time, I chose to find some interview videos on Youtube and some articles online about moms with ppd. These resources help me better understand what challenges mothers with postpartum depression face in their lives.
Key insights
1. With so many things to do and the inability to concentrate for long periods, lengthy sessions can be another burden for moms with PPD.
2. Helping mothers with PPD relax and improve their sleep quality will help make them more productive in their studies.
What did our competitor do?
Besides the PPD course, what additional value can be added to help our users improve their mental health?
With this in mind, I did a competitive audit to help me understand the industry and how other competitors are achieving this business goal.
Key insights
The main features of the competitors' applications are Library of Sleep, Music, Mood Check-In, and Circles(community).
Meet with Janelle and learn about her problem
Janelle is a 28-year-old first-time mom who needed a flexible and enjoyable learning experience, as she could only learn in bits and pieces and she lacked interest in learning.
Why? First-time mothers have a higher risk for postpartum depression than other new moms, and their risk is greatest during their first three months of parenthood, a Danish study shows.
Janelle's pain points
Pain points Janelle encountered with existing software were：
HMW
Customer Journey Maps
Brainstorm
HMW...
... help Janelle take courses at home in a pleasant and flexible way?
... make the app contrastingly simple to calm Janelle and keep her focused?
Learn about Janelle' journey and explore possible opportunities.
A journey map helped me understand the process Janelle would go through to reach her goal and how she would feel at the time. This process allows me to find more pain points and make sure that my design will really help her.
Goal: to simply and enjoyably complete daily study tasks
1. Installing
2. Signup
3. Taking class
4. Submitting homework
5. Completing
The simple and accessible sign-up design helps to increase Janelle's confidence in the software, reduce resistance and prevent her from abandoning the registration process.
Discover Janelle's core motivation for learning and develop a fun learning process to help her continue learning to accomplish her goals.
Dividing the course into small sections of a few minutes to meet Janelle's need for fragmented learning, and providing a way to quickly access and exit the course at any time.
The visuals communicate friendliness and warmth, and let Janelle know that there are other people behind the course who are learning with her and offering help.
How to achieve playful learning?
It was a challenge for us to implement playful learning because we wanted to to make the design of this clinical app contrastingly simple to calm users and keep them focused. Also, we needed to consider the business constraints.
By applied the efforts and impact metric, we finally decided to apply gamification design.
Gamification design
We did some research on gamification design and voted for some practical features to implement it.
Sitemap
User flow
Sketching
Low-fi wireframes
Wireflow
Once we had the enough information in mind, we started the fun part, visualizing the idea.
I did two versions of the sketch because this is an adult-oriented clinical application, and stakeholders suggested avoiding too many child-like elements. Therefore, our team reflected this feedback in a loose wireframe.
Wireflow
A wireflow helps to show clearly how Janelle would interact with the app to achieve her goal.
Exploration
We did an exploration of diversity to try to find an optimal solution.
The first step of mid-fi prototyping was to create a visual style guideline that is shared across our app. The visual style aims at creating a warm, friendly and clean personality.
We also got some comments on the icons, category names, and colors from the test. Users also preferred sessions instead of lessons and homework instead of assignments. For the color, they want a feeling of warmth and friendliness.
Focus Group
Then the company conducted a focus group(4 Participants) test with their original wireframe and our new wireframe, and our design got very positive feedback.
Try the prototype
1. As for the time and budget limit, our team assumpted user needs based on some online research. So I’d like to conduct a user interview with 5 target users to dig much deeper about the mom’s real feelings and needs with PPD and how they normally interact with learning or training apps.
2. Think about the other type of users and scenarios, like the therapist, or the moms who complete the class.
3. It’s necessary to conduct another round usability test or focus group test with the hi-fi prototype to test the logic and visual solution.
From concept to visual, helping people get the most of the subscription by accessing additional-value features in a short time.
From research to hi-fi prototype, designing an effective experience to help travelers create a trip plan in collaboration with others.
.svg)
.svg)
