Becoming
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Title: Becoming
Type of work: Service Design (Final project in CIID)
Date: 9 September - Dec 9
Individual project
Deliverables: people-centered research, customer journey mapping, current state & future state journey, product concept, systems, digital (UI) prototype, service videos, customer experience, service blueprint, user testing.
Software: Sketch, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, Figma
The project brief is to do something that reflects what you're passionate about and would love to design for positive impact. Since I'm always interested in working in the area of mental health, wellbeing and psychology. In this project, I'm designing to improve the new mother's mental health and experience during maternity, as new mother period is a period that needs additional care both physically & mentally and makes a huge impact.
This project is nominated by UX Design Awards 2020 in New Talents catalogue, check out press here.
RESEARCH
DESK RESEARCH
Most new mothers experience the "baby blues" after delivery. About one out of every 10 of these women will develop a more severe and longer-lasting depression after delivery. The reason of baby blues and postpartum depressions include both physical changes and emotional issues.
The baby blues do not usually require treatment from a health care provider. Often, joining a support group of new moms or talking with other moms helps. From research, new moms become more interested in the company of women after giving birth.
*New mothers: gave birth within the last 2 years
FIELD RESEARCH
Goals of interviews:
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What is a new mother's daily life like?
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What's the cause of new mother's burdens and difficulties?
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What's the support system around new mothers?
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Which period of time that they are lacking support?
Overview: 18 interviewees,
including 12 expats, 8 of them joined co-creations
Method: People centered research
Recruitment: Facebook
From interviews with people, it shows that during transition period (first few months after delivery, white square area in image), new mothers are experiencing emotion fluctuations, which also shows a lot of opportunities for improvement.
What makes transition difficult? Here are four key insights from the interviews:
1. New moms feel there’s a lack of mental preparation for the transition from pre-delivery to post-delivery period.
2. New moms don't understand the changes to their bodies after delivery.
3. New moms feel alone at home during maternity, especially people without support system in Denmark.
4. Expat moms are experiencing a cultural clash when it comes to parenting in Denmark.
Opportunity:
How might we enable women who are becoming 1st time mothers, better understand what this is like so they can be more mentally & physically prepared?
TARGET GROUP
First time mothers in Denmark who don’t have their supporting system, for example expats.
FINAL CONCEPT
Becoming is a service that pairs pregnant women with new mothers for a one-on-one sharing experience. The service connects people who share similar emotional journeys. The two women can chat, schedule a home visit, and learn from each other by helping with baby tasks. Becoming provides targeted meet up guidance for each party in order to build a positive offline experience. After the pregnant woman gives birth, she can switch roles and offer help to the next woman.
Physical Experience Video:
User Journey:
Concept Diagram:
*The UX video only includes the more important screens, not all the interactions.
Screen flow:
INITIAL CONCEPT
Brainstorm session on ideas
Co-creation:
I created some key features to test with interviewees, ask them to talk about what they like and vote for the most useful feature.
Goal:
1. Understand what features benefit people more
2. People's real needs
Learnings from Co-creation:
1. They like New Mother Group idea most because it offers companionship and mental support in a small group
2. They like Baby Simulator idea second because it's fun and creates confidence in practices.
Ideas follow up from Co-creation:
Initial concept 1:
New mother group - A digital platform for you to connect with other 5 women at similar stage so you can check in with each other about mood and physical symptom changes.
Initial concept 2:
Baby Simulator - An object that is like a baby, gives different feedback (like baby crying, baby eye contacts, etc.) that requires you to interact with it at a right time. Simulating the real baby experience to prepare you for future life.
Combination of "New Mother Group" and "Baby Simulator" idea:
To bring more real practices into this concept that could really benefit new mothers, I tried to combine the 2 ideas:
Digitally connects a new mom and an expectant mom, then the expectant mom visits and helps the new mom physically for certain time to understand how a mom’s day is like.
Activity:
Roleplay / bodystorming
Goal:
Understand the digital and physical touchpoint of the service
Learnings from bodystorming:
1. There are five key touchpoints need to continue prototyping: Awareness, Connection, Physical meet up experience
2. Partner's involvement is good for the new family's learning (but in this project, due to recruitment in later user testing, partner's involvement has been postpone and put into project's next step).
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
Roleplaying:
Partner of expectant mom (left), expectant mom (middle), new mother with a baby (right)
PROTOTYPING PROCESS
Key touch-points prototyping:
I used wireframe as a prototyping tool to co-create with different interviewees and experts in 5 rounds. Here are some key results from the co-creation.
Touch-point 1- Awareness
How do people know about this service?
The service needs to be trustworthy, meet local culture and brings familiarity. "This shouldn't feel like Tinder."
Touch-point 2- Connection
What's the best way to connect people?
People would love to be connected through similar parenting approach, similar emotion journeys and general filters like location, similar stage, language, etc.
"It's about empathy, this person feels the same as me. What can I do to help her?" Connecting people who might have similar feelings before, can be a way of building empathy between each other.
Touch-point 3- Meet up experience
How to enable positive meet up experience?
To build positive meet up, people need to have guidance before meet up. "It's important to have a guideline, everyone is different. You need to respect each other's culture and understand each person's experience is different."
Experience prototype
I invited one expectant mother Nancy to two new mothers' houses to test the physical experience. Each experience lasts for around 2 hours, including chatting and helping with baby tasks (didn't request new mother to offer, but provided guide).
Goal:
1. Test if texting will help the relationship build up before meet up
2. Test if guidance helps the meet up experience
3. Understand the emotional changes throughout the meet up experience
Tam
Nancy
2nd round
1st round
Nancy
Jodie
Learnings from 2 rounds of experience prototypes:
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People felt trustworthy if it's connected through a platform that has familiarity
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People felt nervous before meet up and didn't know what to expect even there's guidance
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People felt having a guidance help them feel more empathetic and had better expectations
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People felt happier and happier when the time goes by in the meet up, especially after chatting
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Expectant mother felt happily surprised when she's offered the baby tasks
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Expectant mother felt more confident after trying with baby tasks
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New mothers felt happy when sharing experience, but other than that, might need more engagement in joining the service
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Between the two parties, they naturally knew what to talk about and share, and also prepared gifts for visiting which showed a lot of caring within the new mother community without additional advices
VALUE PROPOSITION
EXISTING PRODUCTS
MY LEARNINGS
This is my final project in CIID, which I value a lot and put my whole heart in for almost 2 months. It's not perfect, but I enjoyed a lot working on this topic of helping new mothers and saw a lot of love within this mother community. I am very grateful to have this chance.
First of all, It's my first time doing design project alone, understanding how to navigate myself to move forward is my biggest learning. I learned a lot in this full design process. From this experience, I know how to drive design, what to test, how to ask questions openly, how to bring insights into ideas, how to test with real users and gain feedback, even how to shoot and edit video, etc.
Second, I learned to let people (empathy) guide the design process, especially when I'm stuck. Always go back to the insights and talk to people again helps me to clear my direction. In the end, we're designing for the people.
Third, I learned to always develop the core. I have many interesting ideas bouncing along the process, which are tempting that you want to include all of them. But always keeping in mind what the core value my design wants to bring and what the actual need people have is the most important thing. So keeping the core concept simple and evolve on it is very valuable.
Last but not least, this project makes me truly fall in love with design - Tackling the real problems, listening to the group that truly needs your help, testing with different creative yet practical ideas, prototyping with the skills I've learnt for a year, these all make me want to go further in design industry and continually make positive impact for the society.