Role: Director of Design

Ovia Pregnancy

Part of the Ovia app suite. Ovia Pregnancy is a women’s health app available for iOS and Android. Designed to help women track and engage with their bodies and babies every day over 40+ weeks of pregnancy.

A Timeline of your Pregnancy

Core Problem

The core questions the app wanted to address for its users were:

"Am I normal?"

"Is my pregnancy normal?"

"Is my baby normal?"

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.

Baby Hand Size

Starting point

"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").

Destination

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.

Process

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.

Community

Starting point

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.

Destination

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.

Process

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.

Popular Features and Illustrations

Baby Size Comparisons

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. While we had the typical ‘fruits and vegetables’ comparisons, we also included:

‘Weird, but cute animals’

‘Parisian bakery’

‘Fun and games’

These illustrated posts were endlessly screenshotted and shared on social media by Ovia Pregnancy users.

Celebrating Pregnancy Milestones with Achievement Badges

Ovia Fertility

Part of the Ovia app suite. Ovia Fertility is a women's health app available for iOS and Android. Ovia Fertility helps women and their partners conceive naturally by tracking their menstrual cycles and fertility cues every day.

Customized Ovulation and Period Predictions

75% of users of the Ovia Fertility App were actively trying to get pregnant (versus trying to avoid pregnancy or track their cycle for other reasons). When users signed up, it was often during a difficult time in their lives or after many failed attempts to conceive independently. Happily, our data showed that the more frequently the user engaged with her health data, the more quickly she would be able to conceive (on average up to 2x faster with the app).

From the moment they downloaded the app to the moment they became pregnant, the app needed to engage them over many details of their health on a nearly daily basis. Failing to do so could have real consequences outside of the app experience.

Destination

Since the main actions in the Fertility app were user-reported data entry, I cut my teeth as a data-driven designer with this app. I often collaborated with analytics and backend engineers to refine the data logging experience. Together, we would prioritize popular or critical data points (according to the user and internal requirements) while continually reducing friction for user data entry.

While I led a few significant launches and redesigns of the Ovia Fertility iOS and Android apps over the 3+ years that I worked at Ovia, on a day-to-day basis, my design process was also agile and iterative. Connected closely to customer support and analytics, I could constantly listen to user feedback and respond to how they used the app.

Can health data be cute?

Ovia was aimed at a younger audience and part of my role included writing product copy to ensure the design fit our voice. For a medical app, Ovia was unique in how it spoke to its users.

While we were collecting sensitive data, it was important to me that we keep it approachable. "Kiss and tell" is Ovia's way of asking if you've had intercourse that day. "What's up down there?" is how we ask a user to open up about her period.

Scientific and medical accuracy was just as important as a user's emotional experience. Therefore, I focused intensely on translating rigid medical guidelines into understandable inputs (e.g., cervical fluid, cervix position) and testing this language with users to ensure their understanding was complete.

Details

Sperm and Egg

The app's main timeline includes a pull-to-refresh animation of a sperm traveling to an ovum.

A small detail (but medically accurate), I based the animation on studies of sperm motility. It describes the sperm's 3D helical or 'corkscrew' motion in two dimensions.

Single Log Page

Ovia's key differentiator in a crowded period app market was its friendly, single-page data tracking experience. However, while very effective at capturing large amounts of data in one sitting, other users asked for the ability to customize the data they could log.

I worked with our engineering team to discuss how specific inputs could be templatized to update the UI dynamically. By designing a more flexible interface, we could give users and their healthcare providers more data entry options to customize according to their medical needs and lifestyles.

Customization and personalization were critical to the app, which was designed to include users of all kinds. Regardless of whether users may have been trying for the first time, struggling with infertility and miscarriage, or same-sex couples pursuing in vitro fertilization, the app needed to speak to you and have real utility. User stories like these, as much as the underlying fertility algorithm, drove the app's design and functionality.

Wireframing: Standardized UI Components for Ovia Fertility Android

Process

Beyond creating options for generic inputs like buttons, text fields, and search boxes, the templates also helped us entirely update how we collected some inputs in older app versions. For example, through in-person and remote user interviews, we knew some inputs were frustrating or cumbersome. This helped us replace sliders with simple number pads for typing quantities quickly and precisely and short dropdown/picker inputs with simple buttons to save users an extra tap. Another benefit of this process is that it served to realign the form and function of data collection across our separate iOS and Android apps.

Because these changes would necessarily affect data collection in the other Ovia apps in the future, creating and testing numerous wireframes and prototypes became invaluable in getting buy-in and feedback across our users, healthcare partners, and engineers.

Final Design Logging UI Ovia Fertility, Android