Week 14 — Reflection of the design concept

INDEX Presentation

On Monday we presented our concept to the INDEX judges, we called it SWAN, as the Study of Women Around the Nation. This presentation showed the overall journey of the user going through our application.

It has 3 main components:

Condition Library — This feature is a library where the user finds customized treatments to her symptoms based on symptom tracking.

Symptom Tracking — This window allows the user to keep track of her symptoms creatively and easily, and look at the daily, weekly and monthly data for a better self-understanding.

Herstoria — This feature is a community-based forum that has a daily topic and a daily poll that allows women to share their stories.

From this presentation, the Index judges shared comments on how the project is nice, it covers an important topic that is Taboo and a disparity in the name of the product. One of the judges mentioned she didn’t like the SWAN name since she doesn’t’ feel like a swan, due to the stereotype that swans are related to beauty and elegance and she didn’t feel like that. She mentioned feeling more knowledgeable and nor particularly beautiful, which was interesting feedback for the concept brand. Finally, they mentioned that the business model would be the next step for this to be a good project for INDEX.

Reflection on feedback

Once we gathered again, the YOMO group started discussing why are we getting no substantial feedback… What are we doing wrong? Was it a lack of interest in the topic? Was it that our intervention is not good? Was it that the menopause idea doesn’t improve life?

While discussing these questions, we reviewed the main purpose or solution we’re tackling with the intervention and the most important aspect that we shared was the community and communication part. We all agreed that was the added value of our proposal and that is something we need to keep for other women to improve their lives through this inevitable phase.

During our feedback with Peter, we shared our concerns about the engagement from the INDEX people, and he mentioned that the story of why this is important was missing. Trying to make people empathize through a story is powerful and we were not doing it even though we have so many women’s experiences that are engaging and impactful, even for men. So we had to go back and try to make people feel the connection with our solution.

He also suggested focusing on the business model, a high-level understanding of how the service works. Who would pay for it? Where does it exist? Is it through healthcare? How will it pay for itself?

After Peter’s feedback, we started to discuss what were the features of our intervention, and why they were important. We came up with the following list of attributes as a first draft.

Final presentation planning

From this discussion, we wanted to come back and understand how can we improve the narrative of our intervention, what is the selling pitch and how can we make it engaging? This is something we’re still exploring, but as part of the research, a Forbes article mentioned that the femtech trend for menopause is an unsailed territory and that has a lot of potential for future generations.

Additionally, we started discussing integrating a TeleHealth feature that could allow better communication between patient and doctor. Here are some of the most important points discussed in the last meeting.

Features:

• Tracking is definitely important [nice to have]
• TeleHealth — how can we better design for telehealth?
• Communication easier
• Find ways to communicate with doctors beyond video
• Safe space for patients and consultants
• Doctors are not updated with women’s health
• What is the extent of the community — is it personalized or is the community open to you all at once
• Based on location
• Based on Symptoms
• Based on a personal profile
• Based on professional profession

Integrations — are beneficial if we are tracking —

The form of the overall service

• App
• Web
• iPad
• Qualitative Database for ongoing academic studies

Partnerships:

• SWAN study
• Health tracking businesses
• Period tracking businesses
• TeleHealth

And finally, we started the planning for our last presentation, after some discussion we all agreed to do a microsite, a video, and a presentation. The following calendar shows the first draft of our schedule for the next weeks.

The next steps will be to start drafting the story and we also want to do final testing with a high-fi prototype with one of our main stakeholders (Marjorie) and a subject matter expert interview with Sarah Fox, as part of our last design process.