Proud Mamas a wellness mom app!
“Proud Mamas”, the Mama app that helps you find what makes you feel good and recharged.
Project Overview
With a vast variety of wellness mobile apps currently available and with a short 5 week sprint of time. We a group of 3: Bea, Gonzalo, and myself Gaby, started developing an app for Proud Mamas, especially the ones being through postpartum or the early years of their children. This amazing challenge became our 4th iron hack quest.
My role
As a team we preformed user research, developed a survey, user interviews, low fidelity and mid fidelity wireframes as well as a high fidelity prototype.
As a passionate doodle drawer, I created the proud mamas logo, the onboarding illustrations as well as some of the icons. I also created the mood faces excluding the blessed face which Bea managed to make it cuter. Team work makes the dream work.
I also designed the look and feel of our high fidelity screens, color palette , micro animations and some cool drag and delete animations in our high fidelity prototype.
Design process
We used the design thinking process of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (the “d. school”). The steps we followed where empathise(research), define, ideate, prototype, and test. The last two were basically repeated. We added the users feedback, adjust the prototype and did more tests.
Design tool kit
Our work flow
Our research
We first tried to empathise and understand the needs of our mom users. We started by doing secondary research about the postpartum phases, touched the topic of postpartum depression, as well as physical and mental well being.
After doing our secondary research, we developed a survey which was answered by 86 moms with children ranging mainly from 0- 5 year olds. Due to the lack of time mothers with older kids also answered our survey but the majority of the mothers with older kids where either recently in their postpartum phase, or had been in their postpartum phase in the past 2 years, with their second or third child.
In our survey we touched different points staring by, easy warm up questions such as when did you give birth. Then we addressed their physical state during postpartum, did they feel tired, energised, or normal? Did they do pelvic floor or abdominal exercise, if yes how: did they take a class or did they used online apps or others.
Afterwards we focused on the mental well being during postpartum. Was it affected by postpartum, a lot, more or less, not much etc.. Did you experience postpartum depression , yes , no or I don’t know.
Besides this topics we asked a little bit about their diet, if they felt accompanied or isolated during their postpartum transition. We also included questions about self care and time invested in Mama me -time. Finally wrapped things up with some extra tips and activities they would do in order to feel better.
After analysing our survey results, we went ahead and made 3 interviews. Each mom was experiencing a different stage of postpartum. Before the 6 week recovery, 3 months of post partum, and one with 14 months of being in postpartum.
Competitive analysis
We found of course many, many many apps. Therefore to reduce the number of apps, we chose apps that tackle more than one pain point. The main pain points we where looking for due to our research results, where apps that focused on mental well being, nutrition, mom community, physical recovery and exercises for postpartum, as well as tips and useful information for new moms.
Mum me fit
Although Mum me fit focuses entirely on work out for moms, they do have a section to make time for relaxation and massage. What is very interesting of this app ,besides its very monochromatic design, is that the app really divides the exercises based on your postpartum stage. It also provides basic knowledge information of your new mom body and how to properly do the exercises. You can also specify if you want a full body workout or select a specific body part. The app also gives you the possibility to chose exercises with baby or without baby.
Dana
Dana tackles best the pain point of isolation, many new moms feel after giving birth.They have created a community section where moms can share tips and experiences. Besides this, Dana has an informative section, where you can search for support in common problems new moms encounter . Some examples are difficulties breastfeeding, why do you feel alone, traumatic birth experience among many others. It also includes a diary section where moms can add the habit of journaling to get everything out of their systems. An activity moms also recommended to us in our survey results.
Back to you
The app back to you, is by far one of the most complete postpartum apps. It actually touches several of the pain points we gather in our research. This app provides new moms with specific physical exercises for postpartum, information about a healthy nutrition, as well as useful information about your new mom brain and body. To top it all, this app created a XL Challenge section that aims to motivate moms to tackle diet, posture and breathing ,exercise and training without forgetting rest and relaxation.
After analysing several apps we discovered that although some had mentioned tips about meditation, they did not suggested specific apps or provided very few meditations a new mom could follow.
Mindful Mamas
Therefore we adventured ourselves in the meditation app world, and we found mindful mamas. This app focuses on the emotional well being of moms in every motherhood stage. This app allows moms to do regular check in with themselves, provides different lengths of meditations, such as a simple daily meditation where everyday you get access to a different meditation. The app also provides emotional regulation exercises, self care courses, and some physical stretches.
Key findings
After analysing our surveys and interviews we encountered several key findings. A total of 58% of the 86 Moms from our survey, felt that postpartum affected their mental well being and 20% of the moms suffer form postpartum depression.
Our second pain point is that 63% of the moms could not find time for self-care. At the same time 70% of the 86 moms mentioned at least one activity or small moments that they will do in order to feel better during their postpartum transition.
Defining the problem
Although there are a variety of pain points we would like to tackle, due to the time constraint we decided to focus on developing a product for new moms, who need to find a way to create realistic routines for self care because they need to embrace and adapt to their new reality.
Meet Sonia
A new mom with a 5 month old baby, struggling to find time for herself while coping with her new mom lifestyle. She has now decided to stop finding time for herself but making time to do things that actually help her feel better mentally and physically. She wants to create flexible realistic routines for her.
Ideation
For ideation we went first big, trying to tackle every pain point we observed in our surveys and interviews. After that, we decided to refocus and made a MoSCoW. Where we defined the must have, the should have, the could have and the won’t have features and requirements for our app. Finally we developed a site map and made several crazy eight rounds.
As you can see this sitemap would be our complete app envisioned, but due to time constraints we focused on two sections only. The routine planner and the mood tracker.
Low and Mid fidelity wireframes
After many, I mean many navigation issues in our low fi wireframes, we finally developed our mid fidelity prototype. We decided to add all the different sections as we would like to finish the whole prototype in the future ahead.
Prototyping and testing
When we finished our mid fidelity wireframe, we went ahead and tested our prototype with 10 different moms. 5 user testability where made on site.
Our first feedback, that we integrated for our mid fidelity was to add a screen.In this screen, the user can see the routine activity they recently added. Example shown on the first screen of the picture above.
All of our users mentioned they enjoy the weekly colour view to differentiate activities already done from the ones not done. (second screen picture above) 3 moms out of 10, tried to delete an activity by dragging the activity label. An insight we improved in our high-fidelity prototype.
Our main struggle was found in our routine progress section. 3 Moms enjoyed the graphs and said they would even like more information of each activity. All 10 moms mentioned a simpler form of viewing the activity progress is missing. 4 Moms recommended to add a routine progress percentage section. They wanted to see quickly how many days per month are missing to complete the activity. They also suggested, that they would like to know how many consecutive days or streaks they have been doing this activity. Picture number 3
The same went for our onboarding story most moms mentioned that it was to long and hard to understand. Therefore we have to find ways to simplify the information as clear as possible.
All moms enjoyed the idea of being able to add more than 1 mood to their days. Besides that, 7 moms mentioned a better progress bar is needed to visually show their mood tracked during the month.
High fidelity prototype
The color palette nightmare! We first defined the brand attributes. We would like our mom users to feel:
“Feminine, playful, minimalistic, friendly flexible and caring”
when using the Proud Mamas app.
After doing mood boards and trying to define a colour palette we all agreed making a customisable section will be the best option for our users. So I went ahead and immerse myself in the psychology of colour and purple became the best option for our primary app colour.
Why purple easy, in nature purple is rare and unique to find. We know every mom is different and unique in their own way. Purple is usually associated according to Jacob Olsen with creativity, wisdom, and compassion. Attributes our Proud Mamas have and need.
Besides our purple colour palette we decided to make grey as a secondary colour. In order to add power to the icons of the routine activities we decided to create different colour palettes. This extra colour palettes are only available to be used with the icons and the mood faces.
To complement the playfulness of Proud mamas app, we decided to add the amazing Avant grade typography full of personality.
So after the challenging color palette chapter, we still had to tackle the visuals for our routine progress section. Here it required a lot of trial and error and we once again went back to do some more low wireframes, tested those wireframes and then skipped the mid fidelity wireframes and created the high fidelity wire frames.
Welcome to Proud Mamas!
First we redid our onboarding, we made it simple and concise.Plus we added a small micro animation in the battery.
Secondly we finished the mood tracker and added a mood count. By doinf this Moms can see the total amount of each mood tracked during the month. We also added the names f each mood when the users click on the face that way we avoid repeating the information for regular users and leave it available for new users.
We added the swipe (drag) to delete or edit. As moms without saying it made it very clear during our user testability when they started swiping the routine label.
On the weekly view we added the icons on the buttons with their names to simply be available if the users need to remember the name of a particular icon.
We also included a percentage visuals and a possibility to view more information of each activity by clicking on the icon itself.
After struggling for quite a while and due to our lack of time, we decided to postpone the routine and mood tracker graphs. I must be honest after listening to moms in our user testability mentioning several times that they liked the idea of having the mood tracker and the routine activities together. I just could not let it go. So I started thinking of , Como sí se puede enseñar. (Yes, how could we show it) If a graph is not possible, how wlaw could we show this information? Of course I must add a special thanks to my teammates who helped me and answered my late hour messages.
The result was this:
At a glance, moms can see their routine activities: if they are done or not. If you click on the icon the name of the activity will be shown, this way we avoid our moms to have to recall every icon they added.
Underneath the routine icons you can observe the moods tracked on that day. Plus if a mom decides to understand why those moods are located on that day, she simply clicks on the faces and she is directed to the mood notes of that particular day.
This was indeed long, I hope you liked it and if you have any thoughts, design critiques or just want to say hi please do on the comments section below. Have a great day ! Puras Buenas Vibras to all of you Gaby Tatts
