Mobile design
Developing a mobile solution for single, low-income pregnant mothers.
Overview
Pomegranate is a mobile app prototype for low-income mothers throughout their pregnant aiming to provide resources and a support system. There are many resources out on the web for pregnant individuals, but existing resources are widespread and there is a risk of unreliability. As part of the Design for America UW design team, my team worked on the project for 7 months, conducting user research, qualitative coding, interviews, and more to design a mobile app tailored for our target audience.
Challenges and Barriers in the Space
Low-income pregnant individuals have significant barriers to accessing treatment, information, and resources during their pregnancy. There are too many sources of information regarding pregnancy spread across the internet and in different forms too, who knows which ones are reliable? Where and how does one start?
Low-income
Single parents are more likely to live in poverty when compared to cohabiting couples, and single mothers are much more likely to be poor when compared to single fathers.
Mental health
Lack of financial support is the biggest challenges for mothers. Mothers often feel guilty for not providing enough for their kids. 48 percent of moms surveyed said childcare challenges and personal mental health concerns prompted them to leave their jobs or switch to part-time.
Government resources
Overall, a lot of government resources/programs that provide grants and/or food assistance for pregnant families & those with children. Most work on an application-basis & require certain factors, have limits to how much they can give. Typically seen as a short-term solution
Childcare
Child care resources: childcare is beneficial for working families, but also can be costly & can cause mental health concerns for “not providing enough”
Goal statement
How might we centralize prenatal & support systems for low-income mothers to foster connections and cultivate mental wellness throughout their pregnancy?
Solution - Mobile App, Pomegranate
My team designed Pomegranate, a mobile app with various pages tailored to the needs of pregnant mothers: a community for resources and support, access to resources and information, personalized content for a well-informed pregnancy journey, stories from other individuals in the same stage of their pregnancy, tools to help budget out pregnancy, a community registry to help others obtain items by donating/selling or search for items that you might need.
Research Questions
How do government assistance programs and other similar resources benefit families navigating through pregnancy? Is there anything missing from these programs?
How does pregnancy impact a woman’s mental health?
What does technology usage and access look like for low-income perinatal women and is it an effective medium to deliver health information and interventions?
Is there a particular time during a woman’s pregnancy that is agreed upon to be most difficult and taxing, mentally and physically?
Existing solutions: What do they solve? What are they lacking? What resources do they provide? Additionally, where do these existing solutions exist? Are they physical places or digital spaces?
User Considerations
In order to begin thinking of a solution, my team needed to better understand a couple of things first.
Personas/audience: What do we mean by low-income mothers. Who are our target audiences? We determined that our target audiences are mothers, families, and organizations e.g. women's health.
Related stakeholders could include post-pregnant individuals, family members, mothers with children within a certain age, healthcare providers, partners, etc.
Barriers: Government resources typically seen as short-term solutions, don’t address the underlying causes: poverty, lack of sexual health education, etc. There aren’t many affordable tools for pregnancy such as classes and pregnancy gadgets that can ease the process
The journey of navigating a pregnancy is different for every woman, take into account race, socioeconomic status, and health conditions.
Consider women who do not have support and how their journey might be different/have challenges. Consider women who have personal pregnancy support (family, friends, partner, healthcare providers, etc)
Consider the recent overturn of Roe v. Wade and how it affects women in states where abortion access is still available/ not available
Competitive Analysis
We conducted research to our competitors to see what things work and what things don't work and how we can learn from these points. We noted what other resources, such as What To Expect, did well or lacked.
Surveys
After the project kickoff, we defined our research strategy and objectives. Understanding the target audience and their challenges was our priority. First, we built an online survey and shared it in various relevant communities. In just a few days, we received 100+ submissions. Based on these, we identified common pain points, which led us to the next step.
Our survey consisted of two sections, a demographic survey and a pregnancy-related questionnaire. We tried to identify correlations between demographics and certain outcomes to help us understand user circumstances and how their effects.
Interviews
After our surveys, we conducted interviews with 7 users. We conducted the interviews virtually using Zoom and used the captioned transcripts for our qualitative analysis. We then grouped our data discoveries and thematic codes into sticky notes on Figjam.
Affinity Diagramming
From the data we collected and our discoveries from the user interviews and thematic analysis, my team grouped our findings into categories to reveal what our users need. From there, we began designing our solution.
The results showed that the four biggest challenges and needs by the participants were:
Peer Support
Access to Resources/Information
Financial Difficulty
Mental Health
User Personas
To help our team better understand the people that we are designing for, we crafted two personas to help us focus on our users' motivations, desires, pain points, and goals.
Site Mapping / Information Architecture
In order to organize and structure the information, my team worked on building a site map and figuring out an information architecture. We came up with various iterations and combined ideas to create a final draft.
Design System & Wireframing
My team began designing a design system to help us get started. We decided to use pink and blue for our brand colors, as pink is the color of pomegranates and blue is commonly associated with healthcare and is the most generally liked color. The name pomegranate stems from it's symbolization. Pomegranates symbolize fertility, beauty and eternal life, in Greek and Persian mythology. The Ancient Greeks considered a pomegranate a symbol of fertility and associated it with the goddesses Demeter, Persephone, Aphrodite, and Athena. It is also round in shape, alike to a mother's pregnant belly. With our design decisions made, we went on to finalize our design system and split the work to begin wireframing.
Final Prototype
At the final stage of the design process, my team and I worked on designing a high-fidelity prototype. We incorporated visuals, colors, type hierarchy, and interactions and flow. We showcased our case study at the Design for America Expo in May 2023.
Reflection
Our research was in-depth, which was great. However, if we had a strict timeline and had to perform under industry conditions, how could we reduce the time and effectively conduct research? How can we delegate work to work effectively as a team?
We had a giant Figjam board for our research, but not all the data we gathered was utilized. Under time constraints, I can hypothesize that we would not have had such freedom to conduct such a quantity of secondary research.
