Available on: App Store and Google Play
Role: Director of Design
The core questions the app wanted to address for its users were:
Providing a host of features to give the user a sense of her pregnancy's status and trajectory was vital. A cheerful, reassuring interface answered "Am I normal?" with compassion and empowerment. As the sole designer, I was responsible for producing all designs and assets. Beyond design, I advocated for the user to feel safe and well-informed throughout, whether in user interviews, development, or QA and customer support.
"Help me connect with my child." Many parents want help connecting with and visualizing their unborn children. Unfortunately, traditional measures of fetal size provided by doctors and pregnancy books are pretty impersonal or require leaps of imagination (e.g., "4 in. from crown-to-rump and weighs 2.5 ounces").
By placing her finger on the hand illustration, a user could almost "touch" their baby before birth. One of my proudest contributions to the Pregnancy app, I designed this feature after a mother described the typical instant of first feeling love for their child: their tiny hand grasping her index finger.
I looked to medical journals for studies of fetal hand size and used that data to plot hand size development over 42 weeks of pregnancy.
I iterated through a few versions before choosing to display the baby's present hand size and their projected hand size on the baby's due date. The feature reflected this recurring theme throughout the app by helping the user see their progress and current status.
While it was simple to get the graphic to scale on iOS, I worked closely with our frontend developers to ensure the assets scaled appropriately across many disparate Android devices. As a result, together, we could reliably display a baby's hand in life-size on the most common mobile devices.
While the app itself provided a great deal of content personalized to the user, it was comprised mainly of information about just one person's pregnancy. But Ovia's user-base was powerfully diverse, a knowledgeable community that could help users answer that core question, "Am I normal?" in even more direct ways.
After months of working closely with our product, backend, and customer support team, we developed a unique community based on anonymous communication within targeted, intimate groups.
My first attempt alongside our VP of product made it all the way from wireframing to a prototype but remained a pretty conventional discussion forum with public profiles, threaded discussions, and groups. Ovia's community feature would eventually take a very different shape.
The final design was a collaborative effort, taking insights from team members, stakeholders, and users who were exasperated with the judgemental nature of many online forums. It addressed problems we saw in conventional community forums by enabling quick and finite interactions (poll questions) within smaller, more intimately targeted groups of users. As a result, Ovia's community was easy to engage with, had a low barrier to entry, and less of the fear/judgment associated with public forums.
The feature was a great success in terms of engagement: a question posed to the community took only a matter of seconds to receive 50 responses.
Compare your baby's size each week to a fruit, vegetable, or even a...chipmunk? Among the many features of the pregnancy app, our unique baby size themes were among our user's best-loved features. Most resources before Ovia conventionally compared your baby's size to different types of fruit, famously at 40 weeks, women are set to deliver a watermelon.
