Achieving Equity in Fertility: Mobile App Allows Couples to Share Progress
I had zero previous experience in UX design. None whatsoever. A prolonged job search led me to seek advice from a friend (and current UX designer), and the latest in a long list of rejections led me to take it. Consequently, I am now a student at General Assembly (GA). These are the fruits of my first (pro-bono) labor of love.
The Challenge
On day two of the program, we were thrown to the wolves (so to speak). GA’s UX Design Immersive is project-based learning to the extreme, so we each had to design a mobile application right away — with no hand-holding — and produce/present a case study and clickable prototypes within nine days of initiation. We could collaborate with others but had to submit our own, original work. I decided to make my life more difficult and opt to select the project track that was deemed more difficult by the instructor.
What made it difficult was that my client — Fertiquity — is primarily concerned with the needs of women. As the name suggests, Fertiquity is especially interested in women’s reproduction, along with equitable access to medical insurance. I admit that I am not so interested in sexual reproduction and have only (ever) thought of it in terms of preventing the catastrophe (in my eyes) of an unplanned early entry into fatherhood. Yet, I am passionate about equal access to health care and gender justice. Since this project encompassed both, I was happy to meet the challenge.
My Role
Every student who opted to work with Fertiquity was given a document outlining the project from the client’s perspective, which included four requested features and a fifth that was left to the designer’s discretion. As a creative person, I am more comfortable when I am given less direction and can allow my mind to wander into previously undiscovered territory. Nonetheless, it was somewhat comforting to know that I wouldn’t be starting from scratch and that I could mimic some pre-existing health apps. It was also good to know that I was one of many novice designers and not the only man who decided to plunge into designing for (mostly)women. At least it was easy to remember that the app I was designing was not for me.
My Research
But who was it for if not me? My initial thought was millennial women who were already pregnant or thinking about becoming pregnant. I talked to at least three women in this situation. It was clear to me that they knew their shit when it came to their health, their menstrual cycles, and how a baby is made (a joke). Most of them used multiple apps to track steps, heart rate, and a number of other health and fitness indicators. The other three women I spoke to who weren’t planning to become mothers were nonetheless similar in their health-tracking habits. The men I spoke to certainly knew about such apps, even if they didn’t use them personally (tracking health and fitness electronically seems to be a millennial thing regardless of sex). The only pattern of frustration I noticed from my interviews on health and fitness tracking was that no current app was able to serve as a “one-stop shop.”
The major insight, however, was that an interest (or obsession) in health tracking implies that you have goals of some sort. Fertiquity recognized this and asked for goal-setting to be part of their mobile app. This was harder to mimic from pre-existing apps: I have personally never seen an app that offers a logical and efficient goal-setting feature. What comes to mind are what I would call idealized goals, such as walking the equivalent of the length of Italy in less than a year (I know this because of Fitbit, but it’s certainly not a practical or mundane goal).
After talking to others, especially those who had experienced (or supported someone through) pregnancy, not only did they not set and track goals related to reproduction through a mobile app, they lacked an app that was designed for them.
“Apps are focused on Baby but not Mommy.”
— millennial mother and tech enthusiast
Many apps that guide mothers (and fathers) through pregnancy show the baby as a fruit or some other object representing both the fetus’s preciousness and size (or weight). And, of course, those apps address physical health — but what about mental health? Also, what about addressing the role of male partners in reproduction, pregnancy, and the aftermath? After talking to a few young fathers, it was easy to notice a pain point.
“Don’t know any [pregnancy-related] apps that target men.”
— millennial father
Even though I did not position myself as a potential user of my app, the best research came from talking to my girlfriend/partner (I hate both these terms equally so will use them both). As a fitness enthusiast and millennial woman, she focused my attention on not only the need for male education and involvement but also on the importance of making the app useful and inviting — namely by using checklists. More on that later.
The Problem
After several revisions, I settled on a concise problem statement: Couples currently lack the necessary health-related knowledge and social support to make confident reproductive choices. I will add that the language around lacking “necessary health-related knowledge” applies mostly to the male member of the couple. I say this with a chuckle and a sigh.
I chose to focus on couples rather than singular users because I wanted to promote equity beyond external health services and insurance. I wanted to promote equity within the relationship that leads to a child in the first place.
And I wanted to stand out.
The Process
Most of my classmates were intimidated by interviewing people on the streets. I, on the other hand, was most afraid of drawing. I hate drawing. Or, at least, I used to hate it before this project. At one point during the paper-prototyping phase, our instructor lectured us on “Growth Mindset.” This is a concept I was already familiar with as a former classroom teacher, but I did not think it could apply to my attitude toward drawing pictures by hand. From the basic user flow to the more advanced paper prototype, I am proud to say that my drawings progressed from dreadful and/or mostly text to acceptable depictions of my concept.
I hesitate to even show the storyboard…
After hitting rock bottom, I got back to the basics of prototyping and took the sketching practice sessions seriously.
Finally, a paper prototype I’m proud of:
I chose to discuss my difficulty with drawing because for me it defined the process as much as the iteration of my ideas. At first I was so uncomfortable with drawing that I actually wrote out parts of the app that could be more efficiently examined through pictures, such as the onboarding process and the four “tracks” (bottom-middle of the image above) that a user can pick from related to goal-setting and reproduction. It was only during the paper-prototyping phase that I realized the utility of sketching — both for myself as the designer and for those giving me feedback.
The Feedback
I also attempted to adopt a growth mindset toward feedback — taking it all in and using it as fuel for growth. This resulted in a lot of changes that were difficult to accept initially. I received feedback from several sources: an instructor, two current UX designers, multiple classmates, my mother, and my girlfriend. My girlfriend’s initial feedback — responding to the question of how to make the app relevant and comfortable for young women — led to the app’s primary feature (the checklists). Given her experience with content management, she also had great points about my navigation (or lack thereof). Feedback from current designers — in the context of low-fi usability tests — echoed her concerns, so my main takeaway was to focus on navigation in isolation once I have fully developed my concept and key features. I have trouble integrating logical navigation into the big picture otherwise.
Very early feedback from a classmate, who was developing a similar concept, led me to explore the dynamics of a “partner app.” This took me out of my comfort zone because I have never used — or even heard of — a mobile application that syncs two people together for motivational purposes. Nonetheless, it’s my favorite part of the design.
If I were going to give myself feedback, it would be to do more initial research on pre-existing applications that monitor health, carefully exploring their features (which isn’t easy, given that I have a five-year-old Android and no storage space). A good starting point was presented to me at the very beginning of the project, but I neglected it in favor of information from direct interviewing. I’m not sure why I neglected to do more background research, but it won’t happen again. I can only hope that my first app’s unique features are truly unique. Whatever tweaks I make from here on out will be based on careful evaluation of the competition.
The Result
I am hoping the result is what I intended: a sharing app for partners who are attempting to 1) avoid; 2) plan; 3) maintain; or 4) survive (for lack of a better word) pregnancy. I did not attempt to design a typical fitness or health app because I feel like it has been done well enough many times over. My app is intended to sync with pre-existing health apps while providing an intuitive platform for goal-setting based on available information on 1) nutrition; 2) medication; 3) fitness; and 4) support. By “support,” I mean emotional support, which is the purpose behind the partner sharing feature.
I have left out the information screens because they closely mimic the “goals” screens. The information would populate based on the most popular Google searches, specific to the (aforemntioned) four tracks as well as the four goal-setting categories, until the user inputs enough data over time to generate a curated list.
Without further adieu, some screenshots from my clickable prototype:
Next Steps & Acknowledgements
I write this with some relief that the first project is (more-or-less) complete and that I can learn from it. If I were to bring the project to completion, I would need to set up more (advanced) usability tests, make more modifications based on those tests, and build a companion watch app. I would also need to make adjustments based on Fertiquity’s feedback and revise my rudimentary logo to gel with Fertiquity’s logo.
In conclusion, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge my classmates, instructors, friends, and family members for heir help and support throughout the process. While I am not qualified enough to evaluate whether it was a worthy first attempt, I can assert with confidence that it will not be the last.
