project+ doula nation

Project Summary

Design Challenge

Mobile App. | HCD Challenge, Doula Nation

Women of African descent are 12x more likely to die of maternity-related causes in NYC than white women.

It was that simple fact that drove Shawntel and our team to be part of the solution

Product Team ****

Target Audience

Black, Expecting Mothers

Doula Nation

Shawntel Cyril - UX Researcher, Subject Expert Tricia McFarlane - UX Researcher Jeremy Platt - UX Information Architect Nastassia Molicheva - UX Prototyper

Untitled

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Design Approach

doula nation+ inspiration

Background

Sometimes it is all about NOT being heard.

In 2018, NYC maternal mortality rate was published and revealed a horrifying fact: black women were 12x more likely to die of pregnancy-related causes than white women.

Our design colleague, Shawntel Cyril, knew intimately of this reality. She had become a doula in NYC years before this information was published. She saw the problems first hand.

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Interest

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We met Shawntel as a peer in our UX Design Program at CUNY TechWorks. It was in our Human-Centered Design class that we were challenged to propose and work on projects that meant something to us. Shawntel proposed tackling 'how might we connect women of color to resources and decrease the maternal mortality rate'.

This immediately spoke to me. Both my parents were involved in medicine with my mother practicing post-natal care. While serving a different demographic, they and I had seen many challenges in a poor and rural setting.

This subject also resonated with many of my classmates so we elected to organize and take a crack at this daunting challenge.

Research

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Our team began our journey inspired by how might we connect women of color to resources and decrease the maternal mortality rate. As a team, we mapped out our own research goals, assumptions, questions, and methodology.

Drawing on the experience of Shawntel Cyril, our doula expert, we connected with black mothers and medical personnel.

Our research leads, Shawntel and Trish, lead the interview process while the rest of us assisted in support roles for research.All of us interviewed our subjects in pairs in order to make sure we fully covered documenting and interviewing with complete focus.

As we continued our research, we found out what Shawntel and her peers knew all along: That black women need advocates since the hospital system neglects their needs.

This revealed an opportunity but did not provide insight into current efforts.

Reviewing how other solutions handled connecting people together, secondary research showed us there was a real need by mothers for this service but few resources that provided easy and focused solutions. This set up our primary audience as Potential Mothers which we kept in mind when digesting the research findings.

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As we looked at various potential solutions, we noted the positive roles doulas had taken on as patient advocates and the results from their efforts.

It was evident that whatever solution we were to implement, it would require that we organize it around that type of advocacy.

doula nation+ ideation

Research Synthesis

Our research showed that doulas can make the greatest impact on getting mothers support for their specific needs, we decided to take on the process of finding a doula first. In order to anticipate mothers' needs, we mapped out trends that appeared in our research.

I then proceeded to create target personas through Sketch**.** I documented their potential goals, frustrations, experiences, access, and attitudes.

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Meanwhile, as I was contemplating potential user interactions and assumptions, our research team (Shawntel & Trish) were creating competitive & user-informed moodboards with our ux prototyper Nastassia. This inspiration and research would shape our design decisions in appealing to our audience's tastes and cultural communication.

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As we each finished our individual tasks, we each realized that we needed to meet up in order to synthesize our findings and create a meaningful path forward. I suggested we do a design sprint in order to collect our thoughts and inspirations.

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This lead to forming their potential service journeys to better understand how actual people could interact with a service.

Looking at potential actions, thoughts, pain points, problems, and opportunities, lead to understanding the different stages a mother might take within a service offering.

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Design Sprint

I conducted the ideation session in order to brainstorm. We created affinity maps, used feature voting, mapped out user flows, considered MVPs & MIPs, and more to find the exact assumptions and potential solutions that we wanted to test.

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