Oasis
Client
DubsTech Hackathon 2023
Role
UX/UI Designer
Timeline
27 hours
Team
Catrina Guevara, Cassandra Johnson, Casey Kelly
MamaTime
Gamifying Self-Care
DubsTech is a 28-hour student-run hackathon at the University of Washington. With the purpose of providing designers with inclusive community tech through themed workshops, competitions, and talks.
During DubsTeck's 10th hackathon, I joined 3 designers to design Oasis.
DubsTech tasked us with designing a solution that supports new mothers during their postpartum experience. The solution can encompass various aspects, from emotional well-being to physical recovery, sleep deprivation, personalized support, and community support.
Oasis aims to increase self-care as a critical part of postpartum care to reduce stress by reminding mothers to prioritize this step during their new mom journey.
Context
Problem Statement
New mothers need a way to manage their stress and fatigue during their postpartum journey because neglecting self-care can be detrimental to their physical health and emotional well-being.
How might we help new mothers prioritize and follow through with self-care?
Defining Business Goals + Metrics
Professional Development
45% believe they lack the skillsets to land a job. BRIDGEGOOD would assist designers in starting their careers.
Designer Engagement
Design requires constant growth, so all levels of experience can use the website as a learning tool.
Mentor Engagement
The platform is self-sustained by BRIDGEGOOD partners that’ll provide challenges and mentors.
Task Completion
Ease of use and number of designers participating (measured in usability test + survey)
Subscribers
Number of designers joining the site, engaging with others’ work
(measured in a survey)
Advocacy
Number of mentors joining the site and creating challenges for incoming designers
My Design Process
User Research
Discovery
Due to the limited timeframe and the diverse range of topics we could tackle, our team streamlined research by reading Reddit posts, reading literature reviews, and sending out a survey.
We began by reviewing Reddit posts on postpartum experiences and identified two distinct perspectives:
Defining the Audience
Drawing from our research, we created Maia. Maia (29) just had a baby and is the primary caretaker of her baby. Maia is finding ways to practice self-care but doesn’t know where to start. Pain points Maia mentioned are:
Our team turned our insights to
Reddit revealed that while paternity leave is present, it is less likely to occur. Often leaving mothers with more responsibility and forgetting to fully prioritize their needs. With this knowledge, I wanted to understand the effects of not engaging in self-care for women experiencing postpartum. Our literature review continuously reiterates that:
To validate these findings, we sent out a 6-question survey to women who are going through or have experienced postpartum:
Learning how to manage stress levels as a new mom
Finding time for herself when she’s not attending her child
Difficulty following through with her self-care plan
Feelings supported with like-minded individuals
Competitive Analysis
To understand how current products are leveraged to benefit mothers in postpartum, I analyzed three mobile apps. I found that the three apps lacked two central components: 1. There’s no incentive to continue with a self-care routine, and 2. There’s no community to engage with.
How might we help new mothers prioritize and follow through with self-care?
Definition
User Journey
Before moving to our final design, I fleshed out a user flow to create a cohesive experience. This helped our team identify mishaps in addition to new areas of opportunity that allow for a more tailored experience.
Learning that user retention would be a challenge because of mom’s new responsibility, my sketches focused on integrating microbreaks with behavioral and emotional design so that users feel compelled to fulfill their self-care activities. After going through our sketches, our team voted on screens and sections of the screen that could be integrated to complete the experience.
Wireframes
by: Jenny
by: Carina
by: Casey
Design - Final Solution
Microbreak Self-Care Activities
Choose from a curated list of self-care activities based on time, activity type, and other filters
Scheduled Reminders
Receive automated reminders based on baby’s sleeping schedule to encourage participation in self-care activities
Gamified Dashboard
A dashboard that helps mothers track their self-care activities to see their progress over time with the inclusion of a celebratory screen to encourage consistency
Community Activity Feed
The community board encourages others by viewing friends’ completed self-care activities and adding encouraging comments and likes. Promoting a sense of community between postpartum moms
Key Takeaways
Results
Reflection
Next Steps
This hackathon provided me with insights into designing within tight time constraints. While challenging, it allowed me to experience the importance of leveraging every team member's skill set and prioritizing tasks to achieve our objective.
Conduct usability testing to collect data on gamification features
Create onboarding assessment to recommend self-care activities
Expand on the assessment check-in so pressing behaviors can be attended
The feedback from industry judges was favorable, recognizing our well-designed user interface and incorporation of gamification, which enhanced the UX. Our presentation was also noted for its clarity in conveying our concept.
