Check Out The Final (For Now) Prototype Here!

Project Overview

Project Context

Through a past client, who is an engineer addressing affordable housing in Berlin, I was put in touch with Hanai - a healthtech startup based in Berlin, Germany. Hanai’s mission with their new app, Imarisha is to help women in rural and marginalized settings in Kenya have access to healthcare information. Women in these communities are prone to preventable sex and pregnancy related disease and death. I will be leading the UX Design of their new app, Imarisha, from end to end.

Problem Statement

After an initial conversation with the founder of Hanai, I identified the main problem to be that access to healthcare is limited and blocked by large technological and geographical barriers in the rural majority world.

How Might We Make Healthcare Information More Accessible and Digestible for Women in Rural Kenya?

Approach: Understanding what constraints and barriers currently exist for women in these communities and creating a system that provides better guidance

Project Vision

“To save lives and improve individuals’ relationships to their own health. Basic healthcare and health information should be accessible for everyone"

Understanding the Problem

Our constraints

• users with varying levels of literacy

• users with limited internet connection

• users using smartphones for the first time

In order to get a holistic view that considers the user’s experience as well as the business goals, I decided on the following methodologies: Stakeholder Interview, Competitive Analysis, Secondary Research, and User Interviews

Meeting With the Team

I had a stakeholder interview with the founder, another intern, and Hanai’s data scientist. The biggest insight I gained from our conversation was the features we will focus on based on the founder’s vision:

• Content Consumption - the app will include pages of health info, so organizing it will be key

• Support Chat or FAQ - since users can’t speak to physicians regularly, a support chat can stand in

• Creating a Profile - Hanai eventually wants to enable users to track their own health

Click here for full interview notes

Speaking Directly to Women in Rural Kenya

The Challenge of Recruiting Users With Our Constraints

Recruiting participants for this study was a huge obstacle, as the people I needed to be interviewing - Kenyan women in rural communities - was a demographic that was difficult to reach, both because of a technological barrier and a language barrier. This pushed our timeline back significantly. In the future, I know now to allot much more time for interviews when working with a more edge-case user demographic.

In the end, I collaborated with Hanai to find 2 individuals through NGOs working in rural Kenya. I reached out to my own contacts as well to recruit women in Kenya who had grown up in rural Kenya. As we only recruited 3 participants in the end, it was of utmost importance that the questions we asked were specific and thorough.

The two archetypes that came through from these user interviews were:

• Young Learners, who wanted to take initiative with their health and would be the “early adopters"

• Self Helpers, who primarily took care of themselves, not really depending on the healthcare system

Click here for a view at the full interview summary

How Are Others Solving This Problem?

We will be looking at other African healthtech apps that are targeted at a more similar demographic.

The competitors I found that best matched our problem space were:

• Gifted Mom: Cameroonian app preventing complications during childbirth)

• Omomi: Web and SMS service based on the WHO childhood survival strategies

• Sehatuk: Facilitates access to healthcare in Northern Africa (specifically, Morocco)

• HelloDoctor: Allows you to speak with a doctor from your phone

Exploring these apps and seeing what features they prioritized helped me see areas of opportunity for Hanai to step in, as well as decide which features were non-negotiable. This will be further supplemented with a feature matrix, which you will see in the next phase!

A Multi-faceted Research Approach

This is a demographic that tech rarely designs for in mind. Through secondary research I sought to understand the femtech/healthtech problem space to make sure I was addressing the right problem and constraints.

Objective:

• Define the constraints that might exist for healthtech in rural and marginalized communities

Hypothesis:

• The system for tracking healthcare needs to be simplified and offer lots of support, as the initiative will not exist immediately
  

Click here for a full view of the Secondary Research Report

Changing Direction

Based on our competitive analysis and user interviews, we decided to focus on creating a community forum instead of the user profile for this round of design. User interviewees unanimously claimed that they consulted their own peers and community before making online searches or consulting a physician. Creating a community forum like our competitors would allow users to get the emotional support they’re seeking.

To have a more 3-Dimensional understanding of her, I also created this Empathy Map

Relationship to her Health and Health Apps

To really dive into how our users might feel at each point of their journey to building a relationship with their health. This user journey is based on user interviewees’ response to how they manage health through apps like Flo

Prioritizing Features

From my research, For an understanding of what features we should work on, and features we should leave for later, I created a feature matrix which divides our features into four different quadrants: low cost; high impact, high cost; low impact, high cost; high impact, and low cost; low impact. This clarified for me which features need my immediate attention in regards to how directly they impact the users or Hanai as an organization.

The Blueprint (Information Architecture)

After identifying the main features for the project, I mapped out the specific components of each screen I will be working on in Hanai’s new app. This was a challenging sitemap to construct because of the technical constraints we are working with: limited wifi and literacy. This meant basically making sure the components were small and digestible, but also didn’t take up too much in terms of space.

Ideation

Once both the Hanai team and I were happy with the direction we were taking from our research and project defining, I started to ideate. I had to keep the most important questions forefront to make sure I was staying on track while ideating potential solutions to bridging the gap between Kenyan women in rural communities and healthcare. How can I make it really easy for them to use? How can I make the experience feel organic? How can I keep them coming back to keep Hanai afloat too?

How to Give Her Emotional Support

Referring back to my user journey, I created a task flow to make sure that every step of the user journey would be covered in the organization of the app.

Sketches

I spent time referring to Baby Center and What to Expect for design patterns regarding maternal health, while keeping in mind the constraints I’m working with for Hanai’s demographic. I also spent a lot of time referring to chat interfaces for the support chat, from places that Kenyan women would be accustomed to, such as WhatsApp and Facebook. On top of these Western apps, I referred to Hanai’s competitors to see how other designers in the space have approached the issue of limited digital literacy and connectivity.

Mid-Fidelity Version

Once I finalized these sketches I translated them to digital versions on Figma. There were a few changes pre-testing that came up: including a way to post to the forum anonymously to be considerate of people sharing confidential information, removing the “Read More” CTA in the symptoms area to minimize the UI, and a link right to the Mother’s Community in the featured post.

Click here for a view of all the mid-fi wireframe screens