MamaHelp Noroff Exam Project

Student Name: Mykola Blokhin
Activity: W37.UPX
Submission Date: 8 May 2022

A research from 1996 showed that more than 60% of deaths of mothers occur within the first six weeks after giving birth, or during so called postnatal period. Around 1/3 of babies die within the first 4 weeks (neonatal period). It is a difficult period for the mother and the new born and that is why health professionals from World Health Organisation (WHO) are trying to help with this situation. But what else can be done?

We are trying to find a viable solution for this extremely difficult problem and during this process we will be focusing on research of the topic. This will subsequently help us to get into the factors that cause this problem, find a way to help both mother and new-born baby, and also answer other relevant questions about the problem.

The project takes around 10 weeks, excluding public holidays and some weekends. To create a timeline, I used online service ProductPlan, which allows to build UX roadmaps. Link to the timeline.

Before diving into the research itself, it is important to answer some base questions. But first we need to form these questions. For that I will be using the 5W1H method, which suggests formulating questions that answer to what, who, where, when, why, and how. These questions formulate everything that I don’t know and form the goals of the entire project.

• What factors impact newborn babies and mothers during maternity stay?
• Who is highly affected by postpartum problems?
• Where do the problems occur during maternity stay?
• When do issues occur for the newborn babies and mothers?
• Why do puerperal women feel worried and anxious during maternity stay?
• How can we help support newborn babies and mothers during their maternity stay?

Even though my sister-in-law is expecting a baby and the delivery is scheduled to spring, I do not know much about pregnancy or how women feel during and after it. That is why I decided to use exploratory research, which helps to gather an understanding of the problem itself. I will be performing both primary research, which will help me to collect my own data for further analysis, and secondary research, where I will be gathering data from studies done by someone else.

To put everything in order, I made a simple step-by-step list, which I will be following throughout my research.

Step 1: Literature review (secondary research)
Step 2: Interviews (primary research)
Step 3: Competitor analysis (secondary research)
Step 4: Data analysis
Step 5: Fact interpretation
Step 6: Recommendations

For the primary research (interviews) the goal is to collect data from ideally 5 participants, but I will try to invite more people in case someone won’t be able to make it to the interview. I have a large network of friends here in Bergen, and a lot of them already have babies. It will help to get enough opinions among the those, who could have been the target audience for our future app solution.

As the first step of my research I will perform literature review. It will help me to gather relevant to the project information from the existing research findings. During this step I will be collecting answers to the questions formulated with 5W1H method and organising them in a file using Atomic data collection technique. The results of it can be found on Google Sheets.

Second step consists of a set of interviews. I will be conducting semi-structured interviews with a few open-ended questions to allow the interviewee to talk. I can change an order of the questions in case I see a logic in doing so. 5 interviews will be sufficient enough to get the necessary insights, but I will be asking 7 people to participate: in that case I will have at least 5 participants in case the rest will have to change plans or have unforeseen events. I am using my own friend network who already have kids and can contribute with an honest answer. There is no real “incentive” since all the participants are my friends, but everyone will get a large Freia chocolate as thank you.

For the interview I prepared a script, which is available on Google Docs.

The findings are presented in a sheet here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1E5hlqyFUoq3RCFiddv0NqFQD6FJD2DIidZy2v5_uQwA/edit?usp=sharing

On the third step I will be performing Competitor analysis. It will help to uncover strengths and weaknesses of the competitors as well as to understand strategic features and functions and show how I can improve them in my solution. For it I chose 5 relevant apps, used them as a normal user would do, and them wrote down necessary data that I can use in the future. The results are on Google Sheets.

Using Atomic research approach again I organised all data in one spreadsheet with 59 facts: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nyFtBdgATEykL21BPdRTfrPXj_dsbjMWhQE1DWiHy0o/edit?usp=sharing

Organising data for its analysis is a significantly important step that contributes to the right solution for the problem. That is why I decided to ask 2 main questions based on what I already gathered in previous steps:

1. Where do the health problems of new mothers arise from?

• What factors impact newborn babies and mothers during maternity stay?
• Where do the problems occur during maternity stay?
• When do issues occur for the newborn babies and mothers?

2. How can we help mothers deal with their problems after giving birth

• Who is highly affected by postpartum problems?
• Why do puerperal women feel worried and anxious during maternity stay?
• How can we help support newborn babies and mothers during their maternity stay?

Next, I created 3 themes, each of which has 2 related sub-themes:

Obstructions

• Contributing factors to women’s health
• Problems arising from giving birth

Awareness

• Knowledge about women’s health
• Risk groups to account in the future

Solutions

• Measures accounted now
• Measures that should be taken

With all this “intel” I am able to use a technique called Affinity Mapping (also known as Affinity diagramming) and using online tool Miro I created an affinity map https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVO2pAA7c=/?share_link_id=761594753236.

With the data that I collected and organised I can now draw meaningful insights that will help to solve the main problem on the next steps.

I was able to collect 59 facts from the primary and secondary research, which later on were divided into 3 main themes and that led to getting 12 meaningful insights. Now it is time to use these insights in order to draw some recommendations with how to address the main problem.

At this stage I am able to draw some of the design opportunities that can be used in the solution I am trying to build for the existing problem. Among them are:

• The app should have social network features with ability to engage with other users through posts and comments, talk to other mothers at the same stage and to the people, who have been dealing with similar issues before.
• Learning process should be structured and organised in a way that it is easy to find answers to arising questions at any period after pregnancy.
• Potentially it is possible to create a follower page, where family members could see updates on mental and physical health of the mother.
• Recommendations should be given based on particular user and her situation, experience, and abilities.
• Focusing on both mother and the baby is important for mother’s overall health condition.

In order to better understand how I can help solving the main problem, I will create a primary persona, which is based on the already performed research and the meaningful insights drawn from it. I will also take into account statistics from Eurostat to make the persona more accurate related to the region we are in (Norway).

Key features:

• young woman, 30 y.o
• in a relationship
• having a full-time job

Every user persona has certain characteristics and I will illustrate them with the help of a template similar to the User Persona Type from xtensio.com and will use an AI generated picture from https://generated.photos/faces/ After that I will focus on User scenarios in order to build a character and see how the user interacts with the product or what needs should be met in it.

1. Mary wakes up after 4 hours of sleep at about 8 am. Even though she doesn’t feel rested, she is smiling while looking at her baby-girl Helga. It is time to breast-feed her again and after that Mary can take a shower and start with her morning routine.
2. At about 10 am Mary is ready to finally eat something herself and to check social media on her phone while doing it.
3. It’s a nice and sunny day outside, which doesn’t happen very often in Bergen. That’s why Mary decided to go for a walk with her baby and enjoy such a good day together.
4. It’s already noon and baby wants to eat again. After breast-feeding Helga, Mary has some time to do chores and then make a healthy salad for herself. She is trying to remember eating nutritious food since her doctor said it was really important.
5. Now the time is 14:30 and Mary decides to read something new about being a mother and taking care of her baby. She does it on her phone using a few apps for new mums.
6. The time is 15:30 and the baby wants to eat again. After that Mary gives a light shower to the baby and both of them decide to take a nap.
7. Mary’s husband is back from work at 18:00 and he is cooking a dinner for everyone while Mary is feeding Helga again.
8. After the dinner Mary spends time talking with her husband and then the whole family is watching one episode of their favourite TV series.
9. The time is 22:00 and the baby is hungry again. She was crying a bit more in the evening, which led to Mary having a migraine. She is drinking more water and then feeding Helga.
10. From 23.00 Mary is getting ready for bed time and is checking some apps on her phone and talking to her friends on different social media.
11. After midnight Mary feeds Helga again and is trying to sleep. It’s not easy since Helga is still crying. After a while Mary is able to fall asleep, but she wakes up often because she is worried for her baby. At 1 am and 4 am Helga is asking for more food and Mary needs to wake up.

Task: Open an app to check recommendations on newborns
Goal: Learn to take care of the baby

• Mary opens an app on her phone to read about newborns when she has time between breastfeeding and taking a nap
• She is looking through the app and trying to find relevant information
• She is opening a category “First week” and checks latest publications in there. Mary notes something about breastfeeding and nutrition for mothers. She opens the article and goes through it.
• The article is a bit too long and Mary cannot read the whole thing since she is constantly distracted with her baby. It would be better if the article was either shorter or in an audio version
• In the evening Mary decides to talk to her husband about her day and discuss the article she read today
• Mary says she felt a bit frustrated when she had to put aside her phone all the time and couldn’t focus on the article for long

Task: Open an app with a specialised program for relaxation
Goal: Better handle stress related to giving birth

• Mary didn’t sleep well last night because her baby was crying a bit more the usual. She feels a bit exhausted and moody.
• Mary decided to open an app with meditation programs and breathing routines.
• She goes through different specialised programs and finds the one for new mothers. It looks like they have different stages for different periods.
• After listening to the description of the program Mary decides to try it and follows simple recommendations. She gets a bit sleepy, but still keeps an eye on her baby-girl.
• The program helped her to feel a bit better and she decides to text her husband and tell him about it. In the message he recommends her to wait when he is home, so he would take care of the baby while she would try that program again. This conversation helps her to feel even better and she is looking forward to try the app again.

In order to define the problem I looked on it through different perspectives, which I will use to make a problem statement.

User’s perspective: I am a young mother who is living in Norway and looking for ways to better understand how to deal with all the stress situations at the moment. I want to feel less anxious and in the same time I want to be able to learn how to better take care of my baby. It would be really nice to be in contact with other mothers in a similar situation as I am. I don’t really know where to start.

User research perspective: Young mother needs to find a way to improve her mental health and learn how to take care of her baby.

Who, what, where and why: A young mother living in Norway finds it difficult to take care of her mental health while taking care of her newborn. The reason for that is her constant fatigue and increased stress as well as absence of a good tech solution for her situation.

Based on this, I can formulate the Problem statement (The Point of View): a young mother has problems with taking care of her mental health while being able to take care of her baby-girl and learning how to do so because of the increased stress and general fatigue in her new situation. If I can solve this problem it would benefit the user by decreasing stress and increasing knowledge of baby care. It would also benefit our business since it will bring loyal users, who can be converted into customers on subscription based plans and/or selling goods or other services.

My vision is to create an app that is easy to use and can help new mothers finding answers to their questions, being social, and helping with stress relief. It will positively affect their mental health and hopefully it will help to cope with depression and anxiety during a new phase in their lives.

Based on the insights I got during the research phase, I can as next How Might We questions:

1. How might we help new mother to deal with their mental health issues?
2. How might we help them to find easy digestible information on how to deal with newborns?
3. How might we make a solution that allows mothers to be social and share their stories or ask questions?

The next step in design thinking is ideation and for that I will need to ask my former colleague Arvid Halleland from Netthvalen AS to help me. While planning for ideation I explained Arvid what I was doing and where I have gotten so far. Now we need to get a lot of ideas and go through a brainstorming session, which will lead to diverging and later converging. We agreed on time when we meet and that it will be at Arvid’s place.

Brainstorming is probably one of the most popular ideation techniques used by UX designers. It allows people to be creative and go “all-in” with one’s ideas. I took a role of the facilitator and explained Arvid the problem statement and then we took 15 minutes and some post-it notes to write down our solutions. We used different post-it notes colours for each of us, wrote everything we wanted, and then tried to categorise similar ideas.

The result is on the picture below:

We got some good ideas and laughed at a few “out of the box” solutions. Then we used the $100 test method (we localised it to 100 kroner) in which we were virtually given 100 Norwegian kroner each and “paid” to our favourite solutions. In total we had 200 kroner and we “spent” them like this:
80 kr app with articles, audio materials, and social network
40 kr app that reminds tinder but for mothers that want to talk to other mothers
30 kr site/platform accessible without the Internet connection
30 kr social network with built-in articles on babies, mothers, depression etc
20 kr app for mothers with meditation programs

After a very productive brainstorming session it was finally decided to keep on moving with a mobile app since smartphones are one of the most used tech devices. Moreover, they are always close to their owners or easily available at any time of the day. I wrote down the requirements in the table on Google Sheets.

Overall, I decided to make an app that helps new mothers to deal with their problems. It will have 3 main functions: articles on wide variety relevant topics (mental and physical health, baby care etc), audio tracks with more compact audio version of the articles, with a special focus on mental health programs, as well as a community function to help women being social.

Information architecture helps organising information of a digital product. I built it using service draw.io and the result can be found on Google drive (it can be also opened with the draw.io application itself).

Next important step is to create a User Flow which will help to understand how the user will interact with the app and how we can make this interaction better. For that I used another online service called Flowmapp. The results are available by the link https://app.flowmapp.com/share/769cad6858edcfae29ca0697d02bfe93/userflow/144939/

Wireframing is an important process that helps to bring all the previous steps together in one and actually start visualising the data from the research and ideation. Before diving into it I want to make my life easier by using MoSCoW Technique which helps answering 4 questions about the features of the product:
M: Must Have
S: Should Have
C: Could Have
W: Won’t Have

Must Have
Articles for new mothers on mental and physical health, baby care. These articles should be approved by professionals. Also audio tracks with same material, but organised in a shorter straight to the point way. Community function with social network features (write, read, post, comment, bookmark, reply, add pictures).

Should Have
Personalised experience setup for mothers in different periods (newborn or a few weeks etc) and with different background. In that way the articles and audio tracks can be initially offered in the best-fitting option.

Could Have
Option to talk to psychologist online through video call or even a chat with availability 24/7. That could be an extra premium or on demand feature.

Won’t Have
Full scale online platform or social network, that back ups the app itself. At the moment it’s not ideal to focus on such a large product with a global outreach.

Next preparatory step for wireframing is based on 3 levels of design in order to get positive emotions from the users.

1. Visceral Design. First look at the app and users notice visual appearance. Does it have nice colours, icons, images and graphics. It is important to make our user feel welcome to open the app again and again. And that can be done by making it visually appearing.

2. Behavioural Design. While using the app users cannot get frustrated and dissatisfied by the experience the app gives. It means I have to use best practises and implement them into action.

3. Reflective Design. Does our product tell a story and user wants to hear that story again and again in the future? Make them come back every day and be grateful for having all the function available in one place.

The key point of using a design system is to make a standard for different design elements that can be used throughout the whole project. I am using material.io Color Tool in order to build a design system since it also has an accessibility function. In that way I can create an inclusive system that takes into account people with disabilities.

I am using a neutral grey colour (#757575) as the primary colour to avoid distracting users from the more important functional elements. In that way the design won’t be “in your face” and can be used for prolonged sessions with the app.

As the secondary colour I decided to not focus on more traditional green or blue that represent health, but rather on purple (#aa00ff ), which is often associated with luxury, wisdom, and romance. My goal here is to give positive vibes to the brain of the person, who is looking at it. Something new and nice looking that stimulates positive thinking.

Another thing is the font since I want to account for people with dyslexia. Out of suggested fonts for people with dyslexia I stopped on Open Sans, which is available on Google Fonts. Since this font is also based on another font, which was specially designed for mobile devices, it makes it a nice option to go for. For both Primary and secondary colors the ideal font color is white, but for primary colour black font works in terms of accessibility as well. The sizes are as follows:

Heading H1, 40px

Heading H2, 34px

Heading H3, 24px

Heading H4, 18px

Heading H5, 16px

Heading H6, 14px

Paragraph p, 14px

Elements of the design are presented under and are available in Adobe XD format here (requires download).

Taking into account all the data from the research, using best practices, I was able to create next wireframes for the app, which can be viewed in Adobe XD formad here (requires download).

Principles of visual design in UX help to increase usability and create a good looking design. There are 5 of them, according to Nielsen Norman Group:

1. Scale
2. Visual hierarchy
3. Balance
4. Contrast
5. Gestalt

In order to make a better solution for the app, I will perform usability testing with 5 participants. Just like with the interviews, I will invite 7 people, but aiming to get at least 5 helpful responses. Once again I am asking my friends with babies to help me out and take a part in the usability testing. I will be using my standard consent form to account for GDPR. It’s available on Google Docs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vqY9_i_OyIIZazr7cJjJzeK3v4YqfwnOUETB6P57bzs/edit?usp=sharing

Approach: there are a few options to choose while performing usability test. I’m going for an approach called observation, which is a part of an unmoderated in person usability test. It means I will be closely observing how the participants interact with the app and take notes of their body language.

Goals: start using MamaHelp app, learn its functionality

Tasks: register, check features, play track

Metrics: success/failure while using MamaHelp, time spent on tasks, satisfaction with the app.

Script: available on Google Docs https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tpv7K3uYaeFj8WeUJ9SffbldCy6-juYiQzWz-yrV2QQ/edit?usp=sharing

I am using so called Concurrent Think Aloud (CTA) method https://www.usability.de/en/usability-user-experience/glossary/concurrent-think-aloud.html where the participants are narrating their process throughout the testing. They explain what they expect as the outcome of particular action. I am using help of Arvid again and we are making a pilot test with him.

The final results are organised with affinity mapping technique in the report available on https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Bo9s9DIddtaCXKQ8BHpbmKM1OY65XXfu9wKpLbbFZRI/edit?usp=sharing

While working on final prototype I was able to use my knowledge gathered from the usability testing stage, as well as add some juicy WCAG 2.1 Guidelines. The point here is to my inclusive design for everyone. Blind people can have special screen readers in order to help them get the content of the pages. Deaf people cannot use audio tracks, that’s why it is possible to add textx into tracks, like it is on popular apps Spotify or YT music.

The final outcome can be found on https://www.dropbox.com/s/mxrym8kpghk42rm/MamaHelp2.xd?dl=0 (requires download).

This project caught me in a really interesting time and situation. Right when it started, war in my homeland began. I had to go and get my pregnant sister-in-law with her 2 kids and help them to get to Norway without flying. On the way I helped other refugees, found protective equipment for the military, and became a part of the volunteer movement.

My in-law gave a birth to a sweet little girl and I was present on that occasion. I think it somewhat helped me to work with this project because it gave me extra motivation. Nevertheless, if I could, I would try to do this project in a group to make it even better. The only reason that prevented me from doing so was my volunteering and that I couldn’t really plan everything with another person life/work situation.

I am glad I have friends that were happy to help me with tests, interviews, brainstorming… It really pays off to have a large network of good friends.

In the end, I am glad I am done with this project and I hope one day I will be able to build something meaningful in real life project.
Cheers!