A mobile application that helps connect disadvantaged women with resources and services to ensure they receive necessary care and support.
Role
UX/UI Design
Duration
January 2018, 8 hours
Context
The University of Washington Women in Informatics (WINFO) registered student organization hosted a one day hackathon focused around the question of “What does equality mean to you?”.
Problem Space
Since there are already a large variety of resources and services available for pregnant women, we wanted to help match women with specific services based on their needs and their current stage in their pregnancy. We wanted to provide pregnant women with a support system along with the right resources and information they’d need.
Research
For this project, one of our team members was initially inspired by an article about mortality rates for expecting mothers, due to the lack of access to medical services. After conducting more research, we found that:
- Black moms across the US are three and a half times more likely to die in childbirth than white Americans.
- Between 1990 and 2013, the maternal mortality ratio for the USA more than doubled from an estimated 12 to 28 maternal deaths per 100,000 births.
- About half of all maternal deaths in the USA are preventable.
Iteration
With our research in mind, we began brainstorming within the group and individually. We worked together to come up with some of the design and functional requirements, as well as which platform would work best for the users. We identified mobile application as our main platform and focused on four main design screens that we worked on designing together. We focused on a task flow of searching for a location, saving it to favorites, and reviewing favorite locations.
Prototype
Our last step was to design and create a digital prototype for our mobile application. We used the same screens we had sketched out and incorporated more of the functions we wanted to provide for the users. We wanted the sign up and log in screen to be inclusive of different languages and provide them with the opportunity to use the application regardless of whether or not they have an account.
Future Developments
We hope that this application is something that can be used throughout the U.S. and to expand on this project, we would like to incorporate this application in other countries. Developing more personal one on one care and contact with doctors and other health care professionals would be helpful to the users of this application as well.