Mona
It is a Hormone Cycle Tracker that allows users to take control of their health by understanding their body and mind during the ups and downs of their menstrual cycle.
Mona helps make complicated days a little easier, giving tips on improving your health and well-being by tracking and finding patterns of your symptoms.
Knowing and understanding your body and mind will make it much easier for you to identify when something is wrong.
Context
We live in a world where everything is connected and virtual, and everything happens at a fast pace. Add to this managing the stress of work and the responsibilities of life. Many people are struggling to make time to look at themselves and their health. Maintaining a balanced life is becoming increasingly crucial for our health and well-being. And people are looking for tools to help them have a better balance in their lives. There is no right or wrong way to seek balance.
Everyone has their own journey, and everyone's body and mind respond differently. And the online tools available translate this. Several tools allow individuals to record symptoms, medical and health information, exercise, and meditation, providing access to information and resources about their physical and mental health.
The challenge here is to create a tool that supports people in this journey of self-awareness and looking at themselves and their health, helping them find their balance.
The Process
In this project, the process was based on the Double Diamond, a 4-step design process intended to diverge and then converge while iterating over the problem statement and the chosen solution.
As the design process and well as the double diamond is not a linear process, the iterations happen at various times because the more we find out about the problem, the more it is defined and the closer we are to solving the right problem. And the more we test and validate the solution, the better we solve the problem.
7
Research techniques
56
Users involved
Tools
Figma
Miro
Illustrator
Photoshop
Discover
The Problem
You cannot solve a problem effectively unless you understand it in its entirety. How did it all start? The problem started very broadly. In the context that people are getting sick and not having time to pay attention to their health and live a more balanced life. And for this problem, there are thousands of origins, hypotheses, and possible solutions in order to better define and have a more focused problem. I started to list potential problems and hypotheses.
Problem
Statement
User needs a way to achieve more balance in their life and control over their health because by better understanding their body, its cycles, and symptoms they can anticipate possible problems and take action in advance.
Routine Checkups
Keep their health up to date.
Users may find it tough to create new habits and routines to get a healthy balance in their lives. Creating and maintaining a new routine when you are not healthy can be a game-changer in your life.
Understanding your
body and mind
Users may not understand what is happening with their body and mind and think that it is happening only to them.
Medical record
Users that go to the doctor sometimes they need to review this history
Tracking
Users may need to understand patterns of what is happening to them in the long term.
The Market
What does the market look like?
When you look at the market for health, tracking, body understanding, seeking balance, and wellness. Apps that address these issues typically have features such as dietary monitoring, clinical and self-monitoring, diversified monitoring (menstrual cycle, sleep, mood), activity tracker, habits, motivational tasks, fitness, mental health, symptom checkers, and others.
Competitive Analysis
Based on the analysis of some apps and assumptions of possible problems and user needs, I identified five points that would be interesting for a health App and based the analysis of competitors on these points. Which are:
Understand: To understand what's going on, you need knowledge of the subject.
Tracking/monitoring: To know if something is normal or not, you need to observe the signals your body gives.
Organizing information: understanding what patterns are and comparing histories.
Predict: predict and analyze symptoms and possible behaviors and
Create new habits: with information, tips, and motivation.
After the competitor analysis, we could get an idea of the size of the market and its various solutions, but what most caught my attention was the Femtech market, which in this analysis is composed of the Flo and Clue apps. This is a relatively new niche with a little exploration and great potential.
were women between 25 and 44 years old
believe they suffer considerably from hormonal variation, affecting their lives physically, socially, and mentally
need to understand more about their body and health
like to monitor their
health and listen to
their body signals
Understanding the problem
After the first research, competitor analysis and a survey with 44 people were conducted to better understand the problem. I decided to focus the app on hormonal cycle health based on the central insight from the research that hormonal variation impacts thousands of women, affecting their lives physically, socially, and mentally.
Why am I so tired all the time? Why don't I want to have sex? Why do I feel so good one week and so awful the next? The answer to all these questions is hormones. Hormones govern the lives of all humans. They are chemical messengers, traveling through your bloodstream and instructing you to regulate your health and behavior. They also control menstrual cycles and cause or contribute to the variations in energy, mood, sex drive, and changes in body and behavior that menstruators* experience each month in each menstrual cycle.
Menstruators*: Not everyone who is a woman has a menstrual cycle or womb, and not everyone who has a menstrual cycle and a womb is a woman.
"Over the years I feel that if my body is not functioning well, I am not productive, and my humor changes. Additionally, I like to understand my body. I usually google my symptoms, food benefits and health issues overall. I am curious about these topics."
(Survey responder, Jun/22)
Discoveries through
User Interviews
Four in-depth interviews were conducted in order to understand a bit about the users' behaviors and attitudes, goals and frustrations.
The interviews were transcribed and the discoveries were grouped into 9 categories of insights:
Motivations
Content
Reminders
Data Privacy
Discovering Patterns
Prediction
Understanding
Tracking
Life Style
Motivations
The biggest motivations to use a cycle tracking app are: when users stop using contraception and need to understand their body again; when they want to conceive; when they don't want to get pregnant; pre-menopause; or simply understand/control their cycle and know when their period will happen.
Content
The content for many users ends up not being accessed or loses interest very quickly. Either because it is not contextualized to the period of life of the user (pregnancy loss, pregnancy, long periods of menstruating, breastfeeding) or because of the lack of updating of the content. The users also feel the need always to be learning new things. With this, they feel evolving in knowing and understanding their bodies.
Reminders
Users find push notifications and reminders interesting but feel overwhelmed by how it is done today. They need reminders and tips encouraging them to improve how to improve their health. Nutrition tips were the ones they most cited as interesting to receive reminders for.
Data Privacy
Users don't mind making their data available as long as it is anonymous and they know and have consented to the purpose of sharing the information.
Discovering Patterns
One part that fascinates users is the discovery of body patterns. They understand that it takes work to feed the app and add symptoms, but after it shows them your body patterns and symptoms, it makes it all worthwhile. The best benefit, according to them, is knowing your body better and being able to act on the main symptoms. Usually, in the apps they currently use, this is a function they can't find easily.
Prediction
Users miss a more significant forecast than just when their next period will be. They need to understand when some of their recurring symptoms will happen. And they would like more interaction regarding symptom inputs, an experience like a conversation.
Tracking
Users see the importance and benefits of tracking their symptoms but often lose too much time in this action. They believe that there are two moments in the logging action. One when they need to input symptoms quickly and the second when they would like the app to help them reflect on them, perhaps when a new symptom appears.
Understand
Users often don't understand what they are feeling. Sometimes they think they are going crazy. They miss reflecting on themselves and their feelings. They believe that if they know what is behind the symptoms, it will be easier to deal with them and to accept and understand that it is normal to have the ups and downs of hormonal variation.
Organize
Predict
Create new habits
Track
Define
Building Empathy
The app will be dedicated to menstruators, with a potential age range of 16 to 55.
The mindset of our user is someone who wants to monitor and take care of their health and especially understands the hormonal variations in their body that could affect their life from pre-adolescence to menopause.
In order to create understanding and empathy with end users and a deeper understanding of their behavior and needs. I materialize the users' desires, goals, expectations, concerns, and motivations into User Journey Maps, User flows, Mental models, User scenarios and 3 Personas - Mona, Gabriela, and Lisa.
Lisa
“If today I had an app to write this down, the medications I use, my menstrual cycle, and some other variations, it would be interesting.”
Mona
"My health condition fluctuates a lot and I need to understand my body to be able to deal with any health issues I might have."
Gabriela
"Because even though I am healthy and active i feel like i could do more now in my 30s to ensure a healthier life later on."
Develop
Creating a solution
After the Discovery and Define phases, it is time to start creating the solution for the App. With the information architecture, we can map and design what is important to the user through a user flow diagram that displays the complete path a user takes when using the product.
To arrive at this result the card sort tool was used with 9 users.
From wireframes to high fidelity
Feedback from Usability Tests
Onboarding
Onboarding aims to present the application's key benefits and features and collect personal information for a tailored user experience.
The user goes through some quick steps to fill it with content so that the App has a starting point. It is also made clear why this information is being requested and allows users to change or add it when they want in the profile settings.
The user's main motivations are translated into the question about their goals. This question allows the App to understand the user's needs and desires and customize the app experience, especially for them.
Data privacy
To make users feel more secure in making decisions and providing personal data. One of the onboarding pages is dedicated to stating the privacy policy and clarifying how the data is used and for what purpose it will be used.
Another point was to make the privacy policy evident and understandable to users.
Content
The content is shown according to the user's life stage. And they are contextualized in the application according to the user's inputs and logs. In the Home menu, the content is about that specific day in the cycle. In the Insights menu, the user finds various contents separated by theme and can also search by specific topics. This way the information is contextualized and given little by little, which favors understanding and users stay stimulated by learning new things every day.
Reminders and tips as a way to improve habits and lifestyle
As a way to encourage users to improve their health, users receive nutrition and wellness tips to improve recurring symptoms, as well as information on water intake, exercise, and sleep, factors that influence the ups and downs of the menstrual cycle. The user can also save these tips so that they appear as a to-do list on the home screen and as push notifications. The user has the option to change the settings for reminders and push notifications in the profile menu.
Discovering patterns
The best way to show user patterns was to dedicate an app area to this. It is in the Insights menu. In the Overview tab, the user can get a general idea of their cycle and symptom patterns, and in the My history tab, they can access their history by filtering by themes.
And as a way of reflection, the tabs Body and Mind were separated to bring more understanding that the hormonal variation brings physical and psychological symptoms affecting our body and mind, and everything is interconnected.
Prediction
The users need to predict possible symptoms in addition to their period, fertile period, and PMS. It has been translated into the calendar tab, where the user can get a forecast of the coming weeks, the coming months, and a view of the year, and also understand the phases of their cycle and what to expect from them. In addition, they can filter the calendar view.
