Creating the go-to site for women experiencing menopause
a client project for WISEPAUSE
85% of women will experience symptoms of menopause
Yet, most will enter into it with very little knowledge of what to expect
Design hypothesis
Women need a site they can trust that will educate them about menopause so that they can learn to handle their symptoms on their own and potentially find a menopausal specialist if they need more help.
Duration
3 week design sprint
Team
Raelee Rossel
Kevin Chong
Manali Sibthorpe
Tools
Figma
Miro
Mural
Canva
Zoom
UX Methods
Competitive & comparative analysis
User interviews
Affinity mapping
User flows
Wireframing
Design strategy & concept design
Usability testing
Iterative prototyping
Deliverables
Mobile prototype
Desktop prototype
Research
Design concepts
Stakeholder presentation
How I personally contributed to this project:
The strengths that I bring to each project are that I’m a critical thinker and a strong communicator. I took care of all aspects that required writing, including the user interview script and questions, communication with the client, and writing the team’s script for the final presentation to the client.
I designed the homepages for both prototypes. In our top feature, the symptom tracker, I designed the hot flash and sleep trackers, which had proven a challenge to properly articulate and went through a couple of iterations. I also designed the knowledge center.
I am a big-picture thinker who pays attention to detail. While designing, I would be the one to look across the pages of our prototypes for stylistic inconsistencies and make sure to address them immediately.
“The moment a woman gets one menopausal symptom, I want her to go to Wisepause,”
the client, when asked about her goals for the project
Proposed solution
The client originally believed she wanted an app but when we discovered that most women searched their symptoms in a search engine we proposed a responsive website, prioritizing the mobile experience.
If we created a website, search engines would be able to pull it up, but if we created an app, women would have to already know it exists and choose to download it. However, if most women aren’t even sure they're going through menopause at first then they wouldn’t think to download an app. It also would be cheaper for the client to produce a website than an app.
Competitive & Comparative Analysis
We conducted a feature analysis of existing apps with symptom trackers for menstrual periods and menopause. We ended up refining our symptom tracker to have more robust capabilities than the best menopause app currently on the market.
For example, the main competitor only allows users to input a hot flash as one occurrence per day, but most women experience multiple hot flashes in a day. So we made sure our tracker would allow a woman to track as many hot flashes as she might have in a day.
User Interviews
100% women expressed knowing very little about menopause before their first experience
60% women searched for their symptoms in a search engine
100% women seek out their community for information about menopause
After conducting user interviews we were surprised to discover that all women expressed knowing very little about menopause before their first experience with it. The purpose of the user interviews was to understand the struggles of women experiencing menopause as well as what kind of support they themselves would seek out and benefit from. We conducted user interviews with five women experiencing menopause.
Conducting user interviews allowed us to discover the key features that users want
Feature #1: The Community Center
Participants said they would like to learn about menopause from other women who have experienced it, so we decided to implement a community center. This would allow women to interact directly with other women using the site.
Feature #3: The Symptom Tracker
The client knew that tracking her symptoms was what helped her get through menopause and so she was keenly interested in us developing a symptom tracker. Most women we interviewed were not tracking their symptoms currently but it seemed that was because they didn’t know that tracking their symptoms could benefit them.
Feature #2: The Knowledge Center
Since all of the women felt that they weren't very knowledgeable about menopause before their first experience with it, that provided great evidence that a knowledge center with educational articles was needed.
Feature #4: Doctor’s Referral Page
Most doctors are not inherently experts in menopause and so it seemed natural that this site could help users find the right doctors who can offer expert advice.
Persona
If we were ever stuck during the design process having our persona, Angela, to refer back to helped tremendously. We would call her to mind and ask ourselves if we were solving one of her topmost goals that would help us achieve our minimum viable product within the three week scope of the project.
Detailed design activities
We designed for mobile-first, then desktop, since most users are expected to log their symptoms while on the go. The examples you’ll see below are of the mobile version, however, you’ll have full access to both the mobile and desktop prototypes soon at the bottom of the page.
Key features of the site
Homepage
Symptom Tracker
Knowledge Center
Community Center
Doctor Referral Page
Homepage
At the end of each user test we asked women if they thought that this was a site they could potentially see themselves using and every single one replied with an enthusiastic “yes”. Many also said they would like more information about the site to help them better understand it. This led us to realize that introductory copy was needed on the homepage so the site could tell women what it can do for them when they land on it.
Symptom Tracker
The symptom tracker is the most robust feature of the site and is where we spent most of our time designing. It tracks all things related to a woman’s bodily health in order to help her gain a holistic picture over time.
The symptom tracker logs:
menopausal symptoms
sleep
weight
period
food
exercise
Other features:
insights page
calendar view
journal
Knowledge Center
This part of the site is designed to host informational articles and other content that will be created by the client. Users have the ability to comment on articles that they enjoy.
Community Center
This part of the site was designed to allow women to interact directly with each other. Think of it like reddit, allowing people to post questions and get answers directly from their community. This was implemented after we learned that women would like to learn about menopause from other women who have navigated it.
Doctor Referral Page
This page is to help women connect with a doctor that Wisepause has vetted as a specialist in menopausal health.
Results & reflections
I had an interesting takeaway at the end of the project regarding both the mindset of the clients and the typical user. Our clients were three women working for Wisepause who personally knew that menopausal symptoms can be triggered by diet. However, our interviews revealed that most women do not know that tracking their symptoms and potential triggers can benefit their health.
I was able to see that there is a knowledge gap for the potential users of this site and the client was unaware of the problem. After communicating the problem to the client, they were excited to figure out how to address that knowledge gap so that women could get the most out of the site we designed.
Get your hands on the prototypes
I recommend checking out the homepage, symptom tracker (log), and knowledge center, all of which I had a large part in designing. Please know that profile settings were not built out because that was considered out of scope for this three-week design sprint.
