Creating inclusive digital resources for pregnant individuals to connect with maternal health workers

KINCHIN

Challenge

My Role

1. HMW Improve maternal healthcare access and outcomes for First Time Pregnant Individuals?

2. HMW Help Birth workers outside of the mainstream health model better connect with underserved communities?

Co-Founder & CPO, Lead UX Designer &
Lead UX Researcher

Year

Timeline

Tools

2020

6 months

Figma, Miro, Adobe Suite & Gsuite

Outcomes

MVP Launched

Members added to the design team in my time leading

Pitch competitions won by the team

>83%

Positive reviews from user testing

Welcome to KINCHIN

View & Comment on Posts

On our forum, users are able to read through threads of conversations and post comments themselves to start new discussions.

Post a Question on the Forum

Pregnant individuals can ask questions to the healthcare community and have their queries answered by our

certified providers of their choice.

Filtration Tool

In order to find the best birth worker match, users are prompted to enter more specific information through a filtration tool that asks for a users religion preference, queer friendly preference, ethnic preference, etc.

View a Birth Workers Profile

We designed comprehensive profiles for

birth workers within our community, to

help pregnant individuals get an inside

look into their services to make more informed decisions when picking a provider.

01 Understand

Context

In the summer of 2021, I decided to take part in a startup Accelerator bootcamp (ORIGIN) hosted by Cornell University. Alongside 2 other students, I had the opportunity to kickstart a maternal health care focused start up called KNCHIN. After placing as runner ups in the final pitch competition, we decided to continue working on our venture in hopes to bring our vision to fruition.

KINCHIN is an inclusive online platform for pregnant people to easily connect with qualified maternal care birth workers like doulas, midwives, and lactation consultants.

Problem Definition

There is currently a high racial and ethnic disparity in relation to maternal health care and resources that are served to women of color in the US, especially those who hail from Black and Brown communities.

94% of maternal deaths happen in low-resource settings.

More than 700 women die of pregnancy related complications each year in the US

Screen Shot 2021-11-27 at 7.33.38 PM.png

Discovery

I first conducted a comprehensive research study, which consisted of 5 primary methods: Competitive Analysis, Surveys, 1:1 Interviews, Focus Groups and Virtual Field studies.

My goals were to identify the current challenges that exist in the reproductive healthcare industry, define the needs and support gaps for pregnant individuals/new parents and define the needs of our birth workers.

These were the key insights that we collected for both sides:

Highlights

Pregnant Individuals

Pregnant individuals are confused by the varying amounts of information online

There are not many resources targeted specifically for the Pregnant Individuals health, specifically their mental health.

Over 60% were looking for support groups on different topics and stages of pregnancies.

47% indicated they would use some form of internet search first before even consulting their provider or support system.

They want to know they are receiving verified and trustworthy information about their own health.

87% indicated interest in having the ability to ask birth workers questions through an online forum

Birth Workers

There are currently no platforms on the market that are truly inclusive (i.e ethnicity, LGBTQ+ identities, birth care decisions, etc).

Client management tools for birth workers can be improved for efficiency and be more tailored to the birth workers’ needs.

New and less experienced birth workers need help with marketing, sourcing, and managing clients.

73% expressed that they currently struggle to find the clients who "need them the most"

Creating a strong community is a vital part for both new and experienced doulas

Uncertified birth workers are perceived to not have the same level of credibility and expertise among health professionals.

02 Gain Confidence

Ideate + Iterate

Using a feature prioritization matrix, I then held a brainstorming session with my co-founders and engineer to decide what features we should move forward with that sought to answer our users needs and were technically feasible to build for our MVP.

We decided to begin designing:

A directory of birth workers with personalized profiles

A forum for pregnant individuals to get their questions answered by certified birth workers

Design Goals

Pregnant individuals side:

Focus on creating a platform that they could trust -> implementing a comprehensive vetting system for birth workers.

Ensuring their privacy was respected at all times -> providing an option to remain anonymous when utilizing our platform.

A consolidated way to search for queries, so that they don't continue to be exposed to confusing, contradicting information online.

Birth workers side:

Focus on creating more awareness around the services that birth workers provide

Give birth workers an opportunity to build credibility within our platform -> answering queries asked by pregnant individuals.

Visual Design

As we began thinking about the overall look of our product, we first sat down as a team to begin workshopping what we wanted our brand identity to convey. We wanted to target a more energetic, and young personality, catering to a new, inclusive generation of pregnant people; Differentiate from traditional maternity apps through a more empowering attitude.

Structure: IA & User Flows

We listed out all the tasks we wanted our users to be able to accomplish on our platform on a mind map, developed a information architecture and key user flows.This way, my engineer and I could be on the same page about site structure.

Mind Map

Information Architecture

User Flows

03 Polish

Iterations after testing

Evaluation

To evaluate this final prototype, we conducted a remote un-moderated task-based usability study with 25 participants spanning across birth workers of different roles and pregnant individuals at different stages. This was followed by a qualitatitve survey that asked participants to describe their thought process while performing the tasks.

We gathered a mostly positive response to the prototype. Participants were able to perform the benchmark tasks with ease, and the survey allowed us to obtain qualitative data about user's thoughts while using the app. Here are a few highlights from the results: