JunoBond App
Ideated and designed a mobile app for mothers to help them track their own as well as newborn baby’s health using wearable technology.
This app is designed as a part of class project. I worked with three other classmates and followed human centred design approach to complete this project over a period of 12 weeks.
Team Members: Marta, Layla, Kaytlin, Gagan
My Role: Storyboard, Secondary Research, UX Design
The Challenge
Wearable adoption is accelerating and potential of being a fitness device to a personal health device. Wearable, AI and Biology are sometimes referred to as a new triad of precision medicine. Can wearables accelerates an era of personalised medicine?
Reframing the Problem
How might we improve the experience of personalised medicine with the help of wearable sensors?
Goal
The goal was to explore and apply HUMAN CENTRED DESIGN approach to solve the problem given to us.
Solution
A wireless-enabled wearable technology device that measure data such as the number of steps walked, heart rate, blood pressure, steps climbed, and other personal metric. The wearable is connected to a mobile app so that user can track their health regularly.
Overview
After initial brainstorming sessions and mind mapping activity on what health related topic we should work on, we went on to pick postpartum depression issue.
Postpartum Depression: Bringing a new baby into the family can be challenging at the best of times, both physically and emotionally. It is natural for new parents to experience mood swings, feeling joyful one minute and depressed the next. These feelings are sometimes known as the “baby blues,” and often go away soon after birth. However, some parents may experience a deep and ongoing depression that lasts much longer. This is called postpartum depression. As wearables are no longer only a fitness device rather more people are adopting it as personal health tracking device as well. We saw this an opportunity for us to work on.
It's important to realise the fact that each individual can’t be treated the same way especially the ones who are in depression. So personalised medicine holds a great importance in health treatment. We dig deep into the topic of postpartum depression and followed HCD approach to provide solution to all the mothers who are concern about their own as well as baby’s health.
Process and Timeline
We followed human centred design approach and created a project timeline which helped us to dedicate our time accordingly to each phase of the process.
Inspiration
Whether it's a new mother or an experienced, the joy of having a child is something far from explanation but with that comes the responsibility of the child.
User Interviews: We went on to conduct 1:1 Interview sessions and recruited 5 users including both new, pregnant and experienced mothers. Below are the details and results of the user research we conducted.
Key Findings
- Baby’s health and safety is the priority.
- Frequently consult the doctor.
- Mothers want to avoid any health issue during pregnancy and even after that.
- Unless wearables are not harmful they are happy to wear it.
Secondary Research: To know more about postpartum depression and its effects, it was important to do some secondary research. It was surprising for all us to know impact of this depression and how the mother community is suffering from it. According to one of the studies conducted on timing of maternal death, 61% deaths occur after delivery and majorly because of postpartum depression. According to another study, one of the main predictor for postpartum depression is the depression in previous pregnancy which contribute 40–50% of total. Another surprising stat was the long lasting effect of depression. The effect of postpartum depression on child development is not short it can last upto 14 years. Below are the links of the studies.
Synthesis
After initial research, the next step was to define the challenge we are taking on, based on what we have learned about our user and about the context. We went on to finalize our user base and created Personas. We decided to create a mobile app and the wearable without an interface. The wearable rather can be used as jewellery and user will have the option of selecting wearable color of their own choice.Also we created Value Proposition Canvas to ensure that our product is positioned around what the customer values and needs are. To understand general human behavior, we created an Experience Map which shows entire end-to-end experience that a “generic” person goes through in order to accomplish a goal.
Ideation
We did all the research, defined the problems to work on and thought we are good to move into ideation phase but then came another twist when one of our member just randomly said “Can we make a wearable for child but yeah we have to take care of the safety as well?”. Until now we were moving towards a solution where mother can keep a track of their own health by using wearable but now we got all together a new direction. During ideation we did lot of brainstorming sessions and created storyboard, wireframes along with prioritization grid which helped us to move more closer to our final solution.
Paper Prototyping:
Prototype and Solution
After lot of iterations, we came closer to our final prototype.We used Adobe XD to create the prototypes. Also we created prototype of our wearable.
Visual Design: We had a very good Visual designer in Layla, she really helped us a lot on selecting color palettes and after discussions within the team we finalized the below colors.
Business Model Canvas: This was something interesting we decided to do to pitch our idea. There were lot questions around how this product should reach to the users, who are going to be key members etc. A visual chart called Business model canvas helped us to get an answer to all those questions.
Assumptions
Not every product is perfect neither is ours. We made few assumptions which we obviously feel need to be validated. Again at the same time there were few things which were not covered during the process. Here is the list of few things which we should take into consideration going forward.
- Assumed mothers will be fine with their baby using a wearable. Need to validate this conducting surveys etc.
- Security of data related to user health.
- Didn’t get a chance to interview a doctor, would be useful going forward to look into their prospective.
Next Steps:
- Usability Testing
- More research around safe wearable for baby
- How technology can help us to achieve Mood Tracking of baby.
Learnings
It was a great team effort and the fact that we had a team mix of different backgrounds, we learnt a lot from each other. During the class we used to explore different methods from IDEO Design Kits. It was interesting and challenging at the same time to use those kits because we never had such kind of exposure before. Another important thing we learnt was importance of research at any stage and how an idea (for us wearable for baby) can emerge at any stage. So keep exploring and iteration. Here is a 3 min video of our project.
I hope that you enjoyed reading the case study as much as I enjoyed putting it together.
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Here is list of my other case studies you might be interested in.
Collateral Management | Day in the life study | Fee Flow | Diary Study | Grocery Gateway | Usability Test : Ryanair Website | User Research Projects
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