My Role
User Experience Designer
Time
Jan 2017 - May 2017
What is Bump?
Bump is an Amazon Alexa Skill that helps women maintain a healthy lifestyle during pregnancy. It helps women track water and vitamin intake, manage their weight and recommends videos, events and food tailored to pregnant women.
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The following process summarizes the steps behind the development of a 6-month course project with a team of 4
UX Skills
UX Design - Wireframing - Prototyping - User Research - Usability Testing - Sketch - Balsamiq
Management Skills
Leadership - Market Research - Business Analysis - Public Speaking
Overview
The current course required our team to come up with ideas that would produce a positive social impact. Having this in mind, after a few brainstorming sessions, we decided to tackle the problem of obesity during pregnancy.
Our goal was to provide a complete solution to address exercise and nutritional needs in pregnant women.
Having no prior knowledge of pregnancy and what it entails we sought out professional in the department of nutritional sciences. Through interviews and meetings with these professionals as well as pregnant women in Ithaca (middle-class, educated pregnant women and new mothers aged 35-40 and that are used to technology) we were able to understand the problems currently being faced. Specifically, those that led to poor nutrition and bad eating habits during pregnancy.
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Our research yielded these interesting findings:
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​The biggest concern during the pregnancy is to control weight
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Online tools are overwhelming and not helpful
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Gestational weight gain is a serious problem during pregnancy. Women need to incorporate more vegetables and less highly processed and high sugar foods.
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Pre-pregnancy weight is a crucial differentiator for a healthy pregnancy.
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“Eating for two” and “slowing down” are myths for pregnancy. A daily 30-minute walk is recommended.
Literature also informed us about the current statistics regarding obesity during pregnancy, the most interesting ones were the following:
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In the US, approximately half of the pregnant women are overweight or obese before pregnancy (Rapaport, 2015)
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With more than one pregnancy, the weight keeps on increasing, causing complications like gestational diabetes and difficulty during childbirth (Mayo Clinic, n.d.)
Lastly, we researched current solutions (mobile apps, web apps, and Alexa skills) to understand why they are not working or being used by most women. Our research yielded the following reasons for this to be so:
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Time-consumption - current solutions put too much of a burden on users when requesting information input
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Massive information clutter causing information overload when interacting with the technology
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Do not motivate behavioral changes - Most of the current solutions do not have a clear measure of the actionable solutions and are vague on the outcome of adopting said suggestions
User Research
Problem Definition
The results we got from the previous research informed the goals of our design. We summarized our goals into the following two personas that are the representation of the users that we would want to target.
This stage also led us to define our target users/customers.
Taking this into account we defined 2 personas:
Primary Persona - Full Time House Wife
Jenny entered her pregnancy at a BMI of 27.3 (above the normal range) and was advised by her doctor to engage in some form of regular exercise like walking, trying to eat healthy and limiting the intake of sugar. But years of habit are making it difficult for Jenny to execute the doctor’s advice and mend her eating habits overnight. Jenny spends a majority of the day managing her household. As her husband is the main source of income for the family, he is always busy working and not available to help her with childcare and housework. Trying to follow the doctor’s advice, Jenny goes for a 30-minute walk approximately two to three times a week. She loves to eat whatever she craves and feels it is okay as she is pregnant and anyway must eat more. She does not monitor the amount of caloric intake.
Jenny is worried about having complications in her pregnancy during delivery because of her weight and that is currently motivating her to seek a solution to maintain a healthy maternal lifestyle.
Secondary Persona - Working Professional / New Mother
Three months earlier, Cathy delivered her second child, another boy whom they named Chris. Cathy entered her pregnancy at BMI of 25.4 (borderline overweight), she put on a lot of weight during her first pregnancy and was not able to lose it completely later on. She faced complications in the second pregnancy due to overweight, the baby got bigger and was delivered prematurely through C-section. Today, she has resumed work at her office post the maternity leave and her BMI has jumped to 26.7. She was always tired during her postpartum period and was not able to engage in exercise. She was going to office almost throughout her pregnancy and her hectic lifestyle did not incline her to pay attention to her nutrition needs. Reflecting back on her pregnancy, she recalls sometimes not having her meals on time and not having enough water throughout the day as recommended by the doctor. She would have liked to know the exact kind of foods to consume according to the trimester for good nutrition and also would have liked to engage in exercise. Cathy would like to take charge of her life by being healthier and losing the excess weight she has gained over two pregnancies, and is motivated to find a solution.
From the persona and the interview results we set up our persona goals as follows:
Life Goals
What they want to achieve in the long-term
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Have a healthy pregnancy and postpartum by managing weight, doing more exercise and keeping a better balance of work and family life
End Goals
What they want to achieve in using the system
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Manage weight and stress by exercising while being able to indulge in cravings
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Smooth delivery process
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Understand what exercises can be done during pregnancy and which of those are beneficial to self during pregnancy
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Gain access to trustworthy and verified information regarding all aspects of Pregnancy
Experience Goals
What they wish to experience and feel during their interaction
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Feel understood and supported
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Feel confident, in control of her pregnancy and good with her body
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Calmness in knowing there is a credible resource she can go to to get informed about her pregnancy doubts
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Feel healthier and happy to have a balanced diet and provide her baby with the best nutrition
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Feel she has control of her time
Problem Statement
"Women need a solution that will help them have a healthy pregnancy and postpartum by promoting more exercise and managing a better balance of work and family life"
After a long brainstorming session where we discussed around +100 ideas we concluded we wanted to design a voiced-based solution using Amazon Alexa.
We focused on designing a solution to solve the overweight problem during and after pregnancy. The goal of the design is to motivate pregnant women to include healthier and more nutritious options in their meals without spending too much time and efforts to investigate the nutritional facts. Additionally, the design also aims to help women to create more opportunities to exercise. It will help them to arrange their schedules and make exercising a quick, easy but effective experience on their agendas.
Also, as the other current solutions require a lot of input from the users, we propose a design that will be easy to use and will not need a lot of efforts when interacting with the technology. Additionally, the solution will not be time-consuming,instead it will help women save more time and improve the efficiency. So the design will help time management of our users such
as scheduling doctor’s appointments, going grocery shopping, and other important daily agendas.
​Also, the user feedbacks also suggest that the top three methods of inputs and output should be (1) voice, (2) texts, (3) emails. Given this information, we designed interactions of five scenarios using these three input/output methods.
Bump would essentially be a companion that would be voice activated but that could respond in different manners. We evaluated how information should be sent to the user and how it should be received. For example, reminders can be set by voice but Alexa should remind the user via SMS or email, given we cannot assume the person will be at the house.
Our Alexa skill, called Bump, would have to possess these main features:​​​
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Weight tracking
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Reminders
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Ordering food
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Events and exercise
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Mood tracking
Brainstorming & Ideation
Our first step was creating a low-fidelity prototype. Our first iteration was a simple representation of different scenarios our user could experience. Our goal was to gauge their reaction to the different input/output methods as well as the overall experience. This would help us refine our design.
We then tested this prototype with people we were able to recruit that fit our persona. After a few run-throughs of the scenarios certain problems were obvious:
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We had too many functions
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Verbal interactions too simple - I did not reflect real life conversation
Our second iteration took into account what we had learned from the previous trial runs. More importantly, we were able to define how the user should communicate with the application as well as how the application should respond back.
Input (All Verbal)
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Weight Tracking
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Reminders
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Events/Exercise
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Shopping lists
Output
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Text output for BMI and range
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Text output for water/vitamin reminders
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Text or email output for top five events/videos
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Text output for shopping list / Verbal output for food suggestions
As the majority of the participants preferred text output for most of the functions, we decided to create an app interface as a complement to participants’ verbal interactions with Alexa. Below you can see wireframes and a low fidelity prototype with the different screens of our second iteration.
Once again we tested our design and the overall result was very uplifting. Participants felt the prototype had the proper number of functions and was easy to navigate. Inputs and outputs were clear and information was very accessible.​​
We approached our final iteration. Feedback from our participants required us to change certain things:​​
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The color palette creates a gloomy feeling
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Lack of cover page and loading page
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Lack of a strong sense of branding
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Missing instruction page causes confusions
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Weight tracking upfront might upset users if they are overweight
Our final design would now include:​​​
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Alexa Echo and Dot prototype
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App interface.
The design creates an efficient user experience that reduces a significant amount of time while users interact with the system. The system will only provide the most relevant information upon users’ requests. This solves some common problems with the current solutions, such as time-consumption and information overload.
Typography
Colors
Logo
Prototyping
In order to get first-hand feedback from pregnant women, we went to the pregnancy workshop at Cornell and recruit participants from this workshop. We used the “Wizard of Oz” testing technique. One of the team members (i.e. the “wizard”) describes different scenarios and shapes the interactions between the users and the “system” to gauge their reactions to the prototype.
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Our final results yielded interesting information. For one, we found our user liked the overall design of the application, colors, and fonts were appealing and they provided a good sense of what our product was about. On the other hand, interaction seemed to cause a bit of trouble as our users seemed to require more instructions and needed better error handling messages. A broader set of voice commands and the ability to ask Alexa for help seemed to be a common desire.
Finally, preferences towards functionalities were clear. The shopping list feature was overall the most popular followed by reminders, weight tracking and finally events.
