MamaMingle
Taking care of your little ones is now easy!!
Product Overview
Our group was inspired by Akunyili Crosby’s piece Still You Bloom in the Land of No Gardens. Tasked with creating a prototype to meet one of the pictured people’s needs, we were struck by the mother’s relaxed expression amidst surroundings that were simple yet teeming with life, rife with nature and small, artful details.
The setting of the piece is the artist’s native Nigeria, and given that themes such as racism, oppression, and discrimination are prominent in her work, we started thinking about motherhood, depicted in Still You Bloom, in the context of a larger environment that may offer limited resources to mothers from marginalised communities, in poverty, and/or dealing with the physical or mental health issues that often affect new mothers.
This was how we interpreted the piece: we wanted to create something that would help new mothers bloom and thrive “in the land of no gardens.”
If you are looking for a super detailed case study of every stage of this design process, you can find it here.
What are we trying to Solve?
This idea for a parenting application was created specifically to assist pregnant women and/or new mothers from underserved communities in understanding and caring for their own and their unborn child's health both during and after pregnancy.
Many new mothers struggle with this problem because they don't have the support of their community, don't have a trustworthy location to understand their bodies, track, and learn about their baby's development, and don't have access to a store where they can learn about trustworthy products that they can buy for both their babies and themselves if necessary.
Design Process
Ideation
StoryMapping
Aesthetics
Interactions
Testing
Improvements
Our group was inspired by Akunyili Crosby’s piece Still You Bloom in the Land of No Gardens. The setting of the piece is the artist’s native Nigeria, and given that themes such as racism, oppression, and discrimination are prominent in her work, we started thinking about motherhood, depicted in Still You Bloom, in the context of a larger environment that may offer limited resources to mothers from marginalized communities, in poverty, and/or dealing with the physical or mental health issues that often affect new mothers.
This was how we interpreted the piece: we wanted to create something that would help new mothers bloom and thrive “in the land of no gardens.”
Ideation
The Home Page is focused on the new mother’s unique needs both during and after pregnancy, helping her keep track of a variety of factors based on her own progression through pregnancy and postpartum.
Home Page
The Information Page provides resources that are also customized to the mother’s unique needs and issues she may be facing due to a lack of support or resources. This page provides resources such as blogs, podcasts, videos, and infographics, and can adapt to the mother’s searches and interests.
Information Page
The Community Page is, we feel, the heart of the app. Mothers can join groups that align with their own experiences and support needs. Through these groups, they can ask and answer questions, seek support, and build their community. They can search for new groups or topics by using filters or browsing through featured options.
Community Page
The Products Page features products that align with needs identified by the new mother throughout her app experience. She will be able to see reviews and commentary from other mothers in her groups and community. Drawing inspiration from Akunyili Crosby’s piece, we envision the app to feature products from Black-owned and environmentally friendly brands.
Products Page
We expanded our user research by engaging with friends who are new mothers and searching academic literature for studies that conducted surveys, interviews, and focus groups with new mothers. We searched for issues that were top-of-mind for new mothers, such as their greatest challenges and biggest needs.
We explored these issues within the context of each of the four main pages within our app: Home, Information, Community, and Products, recognizing that each page serves a different purpose for users with different, although certainly overlapping, priorities and needs.
StoryMapping
Necessities/Problems/Cure
App Features - Ideas
Competitors
User Base
Story Map
Mid Fidelity Prototypes
Aesthetics
In order to bring our mid-fi prototype to life, our team began by creating mood boards to hone our individual ideas on the aesthetic and feel of the app.
We considered images, colour palettes, material samples, and descriptive words to capture the essence of our app. We then discussed our mood boards as a group, identifying elements that we wanted to incorporate into our final prototype by considering what we wanted to convey, what might resonate with users, and what would be aesthetically pleasing.
Moodboards
Color Palette
Logo Ideation
High-fidelity Wireframes
Micro-interactions are small, subtle interactions that occur within an application or website. These interactions are often designed to provide feedback to the user or to guide them through a particular process.
Micro-interactions are important in app design because they can greatly enhance the user experience by providing feedback, creating a sense of engagement, and improving the overall usability of the app.
For this milestone we created micro interactions for the high fidelity prototype that we designed the earlier milestone.
Interactions
Try it yourself!
We tested our prototype with the users via face-to-face interview and on UserTesting software to gain insights and understand potential improvements in our application.
Using the curated moderator script, we completed 5 tests face-to-face (two in person, three over Zoom).
Additionally, each team member led three user tests through UserTesting.com, for a total of 15 tests through this medium and 20 tests overall. Here, we report our findings (oriented around the tasks that users were asked to complete), as well as the recommendations for future changes to the app and overall themes that emerged from these tests.
Testing
We used severity rating as it helps to identify and prioritize usability issues that affects the user experience of our application. It helped us in quantifying how serious or critical a usability issue is, based on its impact on the user and the frequency of occurrence. By assigning a severity rating to each usability issue, the team prioritized which issues to address first. Critical and major issues were addressed immediately, while cosmetic and minor issues were address later on.
We used Jakob Nielsen’s severity ratings for this milestone. The Jakob’s severity of a usability problem is a combination of three factors:
The frequency with which the problem occurs
The impact of the problem if it occurs
The persistence of the problem
Improvements
We have received a plethora of invaluable feedback, instrumental in enhancing the application's design. We categorised this feedback in clusters and these constructive insights shall be elegantly woven into the forthcoming iterations of our design.
Design System
Key takeaways and App Strengths
Multiple users mentioned the importance of having an app that works for the specific mother. Mothers have many different parenting styles and preferences, and one user praised the app for its ability to serve a variety of needs. One way that the app does this is by allowing users to join groups that align with their personal interests and preferences.
We can further improve personalization by allowing users to create their own groups, clearly demarcating the questions meant to help personalize content in the app at the very beginning, allowing users to create custom trackers, and refining filters and tags so users can easily select the content and features they want. It is important to remember that the apps’ users will be pressed for time, and reducing burden is crucial in the creation of these features
Personalisation
We designed MamaMingle with the Community page at the heart of it, given that our early exploratory research indicated the strong importance of combatting social isolation and helping mothers make connections with one another. Indeed, users frequently vocalized that it was difficult, intimidating, and even expensive to find ways to connect with new mothers. Several users, in the beginning of the interview before they had seen the app, mentioned forums, message boards, or places to connect with other mothers as one of the most important functionalities that they envisioned for apps geared towards new moms. Users reiterated this need consistently and pointed it out as one of their favorite features of the app. Similarly, several users praised some of the app’s tools for combatting social isolation and post-partum depression.
Community
During user testing sessions, users shared their previous experience with apps designed for new or soon-to-be mothers. Only one user vocalized a concern about redundancy with those apps. Many users liked the fact that the app acted as a one-stop-shop, combining the features and functionalities of several apps currently on the market for tracking pregnancies and supporting mothers postpartum. Users also had very different pages and features they preferred, indicating that the app can serve many different user preferences and meet a variety of needs.