to all the mamas
Creating a caring space for all the mamas, starting with those who have just learned they are going to be.
Overview
The challenge here is to create for talm — to all the mamas, a community of mothers & find a way to translate its DNA beyond Instagram, on talm.co, prioritizing mobile devices. In 2 weeks. By my own.
During this project, in order to meet talm’s expectations, I applied the design thinking process & we will go through the following steps together:
- Who is talm & what are their challenges ?
- We will empathize with talm’s prospects & clients to understand their needs.
- We will define Julie, our primary persona
- We will state the problem based on the user & the market research.
- We will state the hypothesis aka how to meet both business goals & users’ needs.
- We will go through the final solution that came up from the previous steps, including tests & iterations.
The future of maternity (skin)care
talm is a responsible skincare brand that supports women before, during & after pregnancy with a strong belief : to combine safety & efficiency in beautiful products that make us feel good.
Effective, organic, healthy & safe from the 1st day of pregnancy, postpartum & breastfeeding, talm’s products are also
- natural, clean & maternity expert
- certified bio cosmos organic by the Ecocert Greenlife label
- free of synthetic fragrance
- developed & manufactured in France
- 100% safe for mama & baby
talm is not only about products
talm is also about the community, sharing & support. The challenge here is to create a community of mothers & to find a way to translate its DNA beyond Instagram, on talm.co, prioritizing mobile devices.
The 3-month milestone
The main pattern among all women interviewed, 5 in total, is the 3-month milestone.
Indeed, despite very open-ended questions about maternity in general, they all mentioned implicitly or explicitly the 1st trimester as a challenging time physically or psychologically.
I picked up some quotes to illustrate this:
“It was difficult at the beginning because of nausea & fatigue. I couldn’t eat, I was throwing up everything.” A.
“I felt alone but I didn’t want to talk about it so I wouldn’t announce a miscarriage. In the 2nd trimester, you are well surrounded because you just announced it & during the 3rd trimester it’s quite obvious you are pregnant, so you have the support you need.” R.
“We wait for this milestone to announce it. It was a turning point in my pregnancy.” J.
“I needed support after the discovery of the blighted ovum” M.
A taboo recently evoked by Paula Forteza
In addition to those precious insights, Paula Forteza, a member of the National Assembly of France, talked about the 3-month milestone taboo last November 4th 2021 on Europe 1.
During this interview, she deplored the lack of scientific research in nausea even though it affects many women in the 1st trimester. Since forever.
She mentioned the injunction to silence that women apply without thinking too much about the consequences, including the loneliness they will go through.
Paula raised as well the risk of miscarriage that weighs heavily on those women. Plus the fact that sick leave is not mandatory in this case & around 40% of requests are refused.
According to an American study published in 2016, 85% of pregnant women say that the 1st trimester of pregnancy is “hell”.
It really shows that it’s just the beginning and there’s still a lot to do to help the women in this situation.
The survey confirmed the pattern
In order to confirm the pattern previously identified during the interviews & identify more precisely the needs, we shot a survey among talm’s database & got 70 respondents.
87% of them would like to get in touch with other women from the talm community.
Half of them would like to ask to other women questions about maternity.
In parallel, more than 3/4 would like to get wellness tips while the examples cited were related to 1st trimester’s symptoms.
Meet Julie, our primary persona
Julie is a casual mother-to-be. She has 35 years old, lives & works in Paris, & has just learnt she is 7 weeks pregnant. Julie announced it to her husband, her mother & her best-friend but she doesn’t want to announce to anybody else for now as she is superstitious.
“Nobody knows I’m pregnant except my husband, my mother & my best friend. I feel a bit alone. I discover the symptoms without being able to share it & I feel like I need more support.”
Goals & ambitions
- Driven by a quest for pleasure & well-being.
- Her family is a priority.
- Takes her future role as parent very seriously.
- Embodies the new generation of mothers, torn between the traditions in which she was raised & her modernity.
Frustrations
- Struggles eating as she throws up everything.
- Feels sick & tired which makes it hard to hide her pregnancy from her co-workers.
- Is afraid about miscarrying.
- Goes through loneliness.
talm is an ode to motherhood. From day one.
After the empathise step & defining the persona, we came up with the following problem:
Pregnant women during the 1st trimester who don’t talk about their pregnancy because of the 3-month milestone
need a way to
share their experience & find support
because
the injunction to silence from which they suffer makes them face alone difficult symptoms & anxiety about miscarriages.
Sharing is caring
So, to meet both business goals & users’ needs:
We believe
creating a caring space on talm.co that promotes wellness tips, group discussions & meetings
for
women in the 1st trimester of pregnancy
will
break the silence around the 3-month milestone, give birth to ties among talm community, & reduce their feeling of loneliness.
The talm’s club, a safe space for all mothers
More specifically, we want to create the talm’s club, a safe space for all mothers starting with those who have just learned they are going to be. This space will combine two main type of content :
- Whatsapp discussions
- Join a gang of 4–6 future mamas who are in the same stage of pregnancy
- Join larger group discussions about specific maternity topics.
2. Get-togethers
- Attend online masterclasses hosted by maternity experts.
- Attend online intimate rooms of 4 people hosted by facilitators.
- Attend mama to mama offline rendez-vous.
Testing the concept on low-fi among 5 users
What the users liked the most were:
- The Whatsapp group discussions: they would like to create ties with other women in the same stage of pregnancy — 5/5.
- The offline events: they appreciate the idea to meet physically other early pregnant women — 3/5.
What the users liked the less were:
- The wellness tips through a dedicated section: they can already get the info they need on Google & the tips that the talm’s club will provide will be available through group discussions & events anyway—2/5.
- Requiring the due date: it has been considered as a bit intrusive & frightening from a superstitious point if view — 2/5.
Testing the usability on mid & high-fi among 9 users in total
The main feedbacks that came across the usability tests are the following:
- The users don’t understand where they are on the platform. Are they still on talm.co but in a specific section? How do they come back easily on the eshop? In order to clarify that the talm’s club is a safe & dedicated space, I applied on the final prototype the following iterations:
- Remove the cart from the header & replace the burger menu by a left arrow that takes the user back to eshop.
- Include a horizontal menu that will serve as a breadcrumb in the same time.
- Not include the footer on any page of the talm’s club.
2. The users are not clear about the available content. What is the difference between group discussions & online intimate rooms ? In order to address this point, I applied on the final prototype the following iterations:
- Give more context about talm & its initiative.
- Fine tune the information architecture.
- Feature the two different types of content available on the concept landing page without entering too much into the details for now.
- Include a dashboard in the space to recap the available content & guide the users in the case they didn’t read the landing page carefully.
3. The users need to be reassured to commit & engage. The main concern here is to insist on the key selling propositions of the club:
- Drop reinsurance about confidentiality & discretion throughout the customer journey.
- Remind the users they have the possibility to opt out easily & quickly from anything: the talm’s club itself, the emailing cycle if they subscribe to the newsletter, the Whatsapp discussions they joined & the events they are supposed to attend.
- Precise that all get-togethers are free.
The final solution
After…
- sketching low, mid, high-fi,
- testing the concept & the usability among 14 users in total,
- applying the prioritized iterations,
…we finally came up with the following MVP.
Julie, our persona, receives a text message from her best friend saying
“Check this out: www.talm-s-club.co !”
Julie clicks on the link & lands on this page ⬇️
Thank you very much for reading my story. Let me know you have any comments or feedbacks, I would be so happy to read them 🤍.
