Project

Service and business strategy

Role

Product Designer

Overview

Nurture is a modern and holistic app designed for mothers, to help them recover after birth. By iterating multiple concepts, we created a mother-centered recovery program.

Nurture

Feel cared before, during and after pregnacy.

Client

Team

Confidential

Lulo Lopez, Head of Design Jhonny Minor, Visual Designer Belén Ceballos, PM

The challenge

In 2019, a famous sportswear company came to us with the purpose of getting closer to a segment neglected: mothers. After empathizing with their needs and motivations that ended up in a solution brief, I helped to generate directions for a product vision.

For starting, the team broke down a Research Readout about the mother's lives, their needs, hopes, and aspirations.

Defining the problem

Pregnancy isn’t just 9 months

Women experience a 36 month marathon with each pregnancy however, there are no solutions focused on the 12 weeks after-birth and postpartum recovery each mother needs.

We use interviews, first-click testing, competitive analysis, among other methods, to understand how multiple variables affect important human factors for birth recovery.

Recovery is the most difficult, stressful, and influential time for the new mom, however, everybody around them is focusing is on the baby, and when they ask for help, they often feel ashamed or selfish; resulting in not knowing how to ensure the best outcomes for their health.

Approach

Recovery is forever

We identified that Recovery is the most painful and disregarded phase of pregnancy. The first 40 days after birth set the next 40 years.

Furthermore, they face this process with a lack of trustworthy info and support from close circles. People around the mother are fully focused on the baby’s health, but not on her recovery.

Hypothesis

We understood that if we create a modern, holistic and mother-centric recovery program, mothers will be able to focus on their health without feeling confused, ashamed, or indifferent about it.

This will impact their motherhood experience in the short term, their physical and mental wellbeing in the medium term, and society’s perception of the “normal” experience in the long term.

Solution

In order to achieve this goal, we proposed a solution ecosystem and focus on the app strategy that sets the recovery program through original content (videos, texts, and interactive activities) for the mothers.

App Architecture

In order to design the foundations of the app, I built the information architecture and user flows that allow mothers to easily access their recovery programs and find everything they need without big effort.

Concepting and exploration

I started defining how the app would present the recovery program in a simple and understandable way by proposing three conceptual directions:

To Do List
Emotion first
Content is king

To Do List

The app presents the program focusing on goals and exercises to work on their recovery.

Rather than an atmosphere of confidence and relaxation, this approach created the pressure of extra tasks on the mothers' daily.

Emotion first

The app uses conversational language and encourages mothers to track and communicate their emotions.

Oversimplification of emotions to guide content consumption makes it difficult to personalize the app feed in an engaging way.

Content is king

The app emphasizes content. The whole experience is around receiving personalized content and being able to consume it in different ways.

Although this approach was closer to desirable flexibility around the content format. It kept demanding many activities from users in order to reproduce it.

Applying what we learned

After failing and learning from all directions, I helped to generate a proposal that meets design principles and innovative interaction patterns. The app achieves to:

Move from "You must do this" to "What you have done".
Generate confidence through visual design and easy-to-use interaction.
Deliver content more actively.

We introduce

Nurture

Nurture is a modern and holistic app designed for mothers, to help them recover after birth.

Nurture wants to impact the whole motherhood experience, their physical and mental wellbeing, and society’s perception.

Trigger

Immediate action from notifications without needing to open the app.

Today

Cocooning feeling with content that helps mother feel understood while learning about recovery.

Mission accepted

If she decides to continue a mission, she can start getting actionable content right away or explore her profile and general missions.

You

A comforting space to keep track of your progress without feeling overwhelmed.

Revenue Streams

We proposed a revenue strategy among other factors that need to be taken into account when Nurture is to be launched on the market.

Takeaways

There are still many answers without answering: how to maintain complex but simple-to-use programs, how to unify the proposal with the marketplace without feeling shocking, and how to replicate the feeling of intimacy throughout the entire experience. However, we addressed the foundations in a way that will help the course in solving these issues.

Nurture is a proof of concept for what a sensible product could look like. Some of the features might sound familiar but when combined together and designed simply, we believe they deliver something entirely new.