Developing a trusted online knowledge resource for pregnant individuals
User Research Internship at KINCHIN, Summer 2021
A case study
About KINCHIN
KINCHIN is a health resource website that connects pregnant individuals with birth workers, such as midwives and doulas. KINCHIN has a directory of birth workers offering services across the country and a forum that allows pregnant individuals to ask questions of birth workers or other pregnant individuals. Birth workers are also able to write their own articles about important topics they wish to share with the community. KINCHIN is set to launch in 2022.
Internship Goals
My big tasks when I joined KINCHIN were to validate the feature concepts proposed in Spring of 2021. Those feature concepts were:
The need for a “quora style” forum to connect pregnant individuals with birth workers
Articles written by birth workers to inform and educate pregnant individuals about pregnancy, birth and postpartum experiences.
To achieve these larger goals I used the following user research methods:
Survey design + analysis
User interviews
Research analysis/Affinity mapping
Persona development
During my final presentation I had 11 concrete design, feature, and strategy recommendations and next step recommendations ready to handoff to the team.
Survey Design
I created a survey to collect general anonymous information from pregnant individuals, and to test the popularity of having access to a forum with birth workers and to read articles written by birth workers. I received 28 responses from people around the country with a fairly diverse range of income and racial backgrounds.
Feature Validation Findings:
Interest in forum
86.5% indicated interest in having the ability to ask birth workers questions through an online forum
(73% yes + 13.5% maybe)
Interest in articles
93% indicated interest in articles written by birth workers
(73% yes + 20% maybe)
General Survey Findings:
80% felt very supported by friends and family
The top 3 most trusted sources of information were:
Their doctor or birth worker
Published books
Websites specifically about pregnancy and birth
47% indicated they would first use some form of internet search when they had a new question about pregnancy
Many participants had considered hiring a birth worker but only 33% had actually hired a birth worker
User Interviews
In order to gain a better understanding of how KINCHIN can support pregnant individuals, I conducted interviews asking participants about their pregnancy, birth and postpartum experiences. The interviews lasted for about 25 minutes each with 3 participants.
Some goals of the interviews were:
To learn about the participants prior exposure to birth workers
How they sought out information when they had questions
What sources of information they trusted or did not trust
To learn about they type of care they had received
Affinity Mapping
I conducted an affinity mapping session with the UX team at KINCHIN to analyze the data points collected from user interviews with pregnant individuals. We completed three rounds; first topic mapping, then theme mapping and we finally concluded with “I” statements. Each interviewee was assigned a different post-it note color.
One of my most significant findings was that all users had difficulty discerning what information they could trust online. Two women shared that some online reading could cause a lot of anxiety. One stopped looking online because she didn’t find a source she could trust. This helped us realize that one of our biggest priorities would be to foster user trust in KINCHIN.
Other affinity mapping takeaways:
All struggled with health complications at some point
They all felt very supported by their communities, though there were some ways they lacked support.
They actively sought out information about their pregnancies and trusted their doctors or midwife. They also sought out information from friends and family who had also been pregnant.
They were all happy with the care they had received
To view the full affinity map in detail please go to the miro board here.
Persona
After analyzing the data collected from the surveys and interviews I was able to develop a persona of KINCHIN’s “super-user” for designers to keep in mind while designing.
Meet Clara
Clara is a pregnant individual who is well supported by her community and who actively seeks out information. She has had difficulty managing gestational diabetes and has a lot of questions about what to expect throughout pregnancy, birth and post-partum. Her most trusted sources are her doctor and friends and family. She searches for information online though she remains very cautious about what online sources she can trust. She likes reading the experiences of other pregnant individuals because it helps her know what to expect with her pregnancy. She is interested in working with a doula for her hospital birth but is still doing research on the matter.
Design Recommendations
At the end of my internship I delivered 11 design, feature, and strategy recommendations to foster trust:
Have a clear mission statement. People should be able to read about why KINCHIN was founded and what its purpose is.
Develop evergreen content. For example, have pages that offer definitions of what different types of birth workers do as well as general information about pregnancy and childbirth. This will be informative to users and will be content that can easily be pulled up by search engines.
Create community guidelines. These need to be easily accessible on the site, probably near the mission statement, or could be delivered as a pop-up before users are allowed to post.
Require pregnant individuals (PI’s) and birth workers to sign off on community guidelines before posting or interacting with others.
When posting, allow PI to choose audience for questions: all, birth workers, or other PI’s.
When viewing the responses to their post allow PI’s to filter for responses by: all, birth workers, or other PI’s.
Allow others to flag inappropriate posts for review or removal
KINCHIN should develop a policy considering under what circumstances they will block offenders.
KINCHIN should allow people to tag their posts similar to the tags used in reddit forums. Examples include: rant, advice, question, need advice, trigger warning, funny.
KINCHIN should be very aware of the fact that pregnancy is an extremely emotional time when people feel vulnerable. If posts can be considered triggering they should be clearly labeled and perhaps require people to acknowledge a pop-up that gives them the chance to consider if they are reading too many triggering articles on a certain topic before continuing to that thread. For example conversations around miscarriages or stillborn births, or any number of other extremely sensitive topics.
KINCHIN could consider adding therapists to their roster of health professionals for the site. One participant saw a therapist throughout her pregnancy and highly recommended it as a means of support.
Of all of my recommendations, the founders were most excited by the last two. They were instantly inspired to come up with ideas around protecting people from obsessing over some of the upsetting things that can go wrong in pregnancy.
They also were excited to have me suggest bringing therapists onto the site as a new category of caregiver. The reason was two-fold; therapists can offer valuable help to users and help finance the site through paying a monthly advertising fee. They had never thought of adding therapists before.
In Conclusion
My research determined that KINCHIN should prove to be a valuable resource to pregnant individuals (PI’s). Most PI’s we surveyed are interested in reading articles written by birth workers and having their questions answered by birth workers. By being an accessible and open platform that offers birth worker support but doesn’t push paid services on pregnant individuals, KINCHIN can build a reputation as a safe and reliable place online. Though I interviewed three individuals with good knowledge about birth workers, I believe that there may be a knowledge gap throughout the country, about the role birth workers can play in allowing people to have safe, healthy births. Through KINCHIN birth workers will have an opportunity to prove their knowledge to people who may not have much exposure to birth workers and this could help more people feel safe in seeking out the help birth workers provide.
High-fidelity wireframes developed with input from my research.
WISEPAUSE
UX Design & Research