Womaneeds : Period Reminder App— An UX Case Study
Have you ever forget your recent period date and your day become a mess because you get a red day at school, or at work ?? It must be frustrating.
In the next period, you can’t skip to note the date because you don’t want another ‘red day’.
To prevent the mess, i think we need a reminder😉
Case
There are still so many women who are currently do not know how to count their period cycle and monitor their menstruation health. This design of experience will help women to know their period cycle and make an insightful information for women’s health.
Design Process
For this project, I decided to use Design Thinking as my method of this project. Here is the explanation of my design process to solve the problem above.
Problem Statement
To start off, i did a quick survey to my closest friends and asked them questions. ‘Did you guys always know when is your period day come?’ and… ‘Did you know your period cycle?’
And most of them said, ‘No’. They did not know about their period cycle and only predict the next period date randomly. One of my friends answer, ‘That’s okay to didn’t know when is the actual date because i always lucky to know it in the early morning when i still at home.’
If it’s the answer, then, how about the other woman who always get it when they were already outside the house and do activities? It must be ashamed of them if they get ‘red’ in their pants. Married women also need to pay attention to their fertile period to delay a pregnancy or planning to have a pregnancy program. The worst, for unmarried woman and sexually active, they can not prevent an unplanned birth.
I think a period reminder will be a great help. And that is how i try to cope with that scenario.
As i did more research, woman’s period cycle is not always same and stay irregular, every month. And not every woman mark their date too. They have various reasons like… they were busy and not having much time to note it on their calendar or they really do not care about it.
As I mentioned earlier, there are still so many women who are currently do not know how to count their period cycle and monitor their menstruation health. By knowing the period cycle, we do not need to guess when the actual period is coming. We will know and monitor the period cycle, if it is consistent or not. Besides, we will know several worrying indications happened in the period cycle.
Then, i defined the problem by make it into 5W+1H.
- What — i decided to make a mobile app for reminding and predict period day
- Who — For woman who have experienced period/menstruation
- When — Before period day, after period day and when period day
- Where — Can use and check the app every where, any where
- Why — User can predict the next period day and can prepare period day better
- How — Information about period reminder and period insights in one app.
User Persona
Based on online research I did by sharing a survey, there are 3 types of woman needed period reminder : (1) Student, (2) Employed Woman, and (3) Not employed woman.
After segmented by 3, most of them are teenager, the age variations start from 13–17 years old and older woman in their late 20s. I also found that they are mostly students.
From Kyla’s persona above, we been knew that she is not really care about her menstruation cycle. She wants to get the menstruation date right but it’s hard for her because she didn’t note her menstruation date and just wait for the menstruation date comes with flow.
Research
Based on a women health journal titled, ‘Examining Menstrual Tracking to Inform the Design of Personal Informatics Tools’, there are five reasons why woman track their period cycles, (1.) To be aware of what their body doing, (2.) To understand their body’s reactions to different phases of their cycle, (3) To be better prepared, (4) To become pregnant, and (5) To inform conversations with healthcare providers. Those reasons are encouraging to track their period cycle.
From a quick interview i did to my friends and in the questionnaire, they responded, ‘I need an app to predict the next period so i can prepare better and not forget to bring pads.’ This indicates that we need to make an app which can remind about period. A married women ever responded that they need an app to follow up their period cycle, because it’s really important to help them to get pregnant or to cancel pregnancy. ‘When I was younger I used to just remember. When I started trying for a baby, it became important to know my fertile times.’
Remembering period cycle is not only about to get pregnant or to cancel pregnancy. It’s also about ‘ourself’. Some respondent who is a student and not married yet answered, ‘I need to follow up my period cycle, because i want to know how healthy i am and i can aware of my body.’
From the article and all the respondent answers from questionnaire, it convinced me more to design an app that can help to solve all the frustrations and goals from the women.
Define
In this process, I have to state my user’s needs and problems and analyze it by the explanation below.
Validation Problem
From the questionnaire I shared on some social media platforms, I got 34 respondents. And here is the explanation of demographic. Based on the data, we can conclude that most of them are students (45,95%).
From the data above, student got the highest percentage and employed got the second highest percentage because they were the busy type woman who didn’t pay attention a lot about period date.
Ideate
The third process is ideate. This process is finding the solution of the problems.
Solution description
I want to make a mobile app because I think that its more convenient to use and practically easy. The name of this mobile app is Womaneeds. Womaneeds will help the user to track their menstruation cycle, act as reminder and get to know more about menstruation health insights. In this app, there are several things can be done :
· Track the menstruation date, forecast the next menstruation period
· Get more information and insights about menstruation health from joining womaneeds community
· Know about the result of monthly menstruation health
Low Fidelity Design
Before making it into the high fidelity prototype, I made a low fidelity design because its one of important thing to visualize the flow of an app. Low fidelity design, focuses more on the overall flow rather than details and visual. We need pencil and paper to draw the low fidelity design. Time saving and faster to do.
Here is the low fidelity design of Womaneeds app.
Prototype
In this step, I have to make prototype and user flow from the solution above.
User Flow
User Flow is the set of steps that users do to use a product or to finish a task. User Flow is really important so we can know what can we do in an app.
High Fidelity Design
I decided to make high fidelity design because it’s more functional and interactive. Besides, it’s better to have the visualization of the app. Here is the hi-fi prototype.
Test
Test is the last step of the process design. In this step, we should test the prototype that we made to users.
Usability Testing
Usability test is a method of evaluating that used in user-centered interaction design to evaluate a product by testing it on the users. Usability testing is really important because we will know how the real users feel about using our mobile app.
In this stage, I gave some scenarios to the user and let the user run the scenario. The purpose is to explore the app in user’s view and to know user’s understanding about the app. I did the usability testing to 5 people. Out from 4 of 5 people successfully run the app completely until the end. And the rest, find it confused after explore the moodboard.
Conclusion
By doing this research, i feel so much fun and learn so many things that i’ve never learned before. And i really enjoyed the whole process. One thing that i should remember is, i think should pay attention at making design. Not only the visual but also the flow process.
Based on the usability testing I did, this app is need to added more feature in the community where the user can share their thoughts or story about their problems. So the community is not only about read the articles but also a place which can share an experience about menstruation health.
From all the explanation above, I can conclude that I need to learn more about the UX research and UX design. This is my first time doing a UX research and UX design, and I realized that I still have so much thing to learn.
Thank you for reading. If you don’t mind, please leave a trace by giving a clap or a comment. As a newbie, it is really highly appreciated as a big help.
