Check Out The Final (For Now) Prototype Here!

Project Overview

Project Context

Hanai a healthtech startup based in Berlin, Germany is on a mission to help women in rural and marginalized settings have access to healthcare information. Women in these communities often don’t know what to do in an emergency and place healthcare low in priorities, which can become a life or death problem in some cases. Hanai is already changing the lives of women, one community at a time. Their app, Jiwa Ibu was targeted at women in rural Malaysia, and are now creating an app for women in Kenya, Imarisha.

Many of these women may not know how to read, and may also have limited access to internet connection. The information needs to be easy to find and understand. Hanai hopes to bridge the gap between healthcare providers and the women that they serve.

Problem Statement

After speaking with the founder of Hanai in conjunction with some light secondary research to start, I identified the main problem to be that access to healthcare is limited in the rural majority world. We want to decrease the death rate for medical complications that could have been prevented with better access to healthcare as well as more preventative measures.

How Might We Make Healthcare Information More 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

How Might Better Educate the Community and Promote Preventative Rather than Reactive Care?

Approach: Designing a flow that encourages creating a relationship to ones own health in a low maintenance way

Project Vision

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

My Design Process

We’ll begin with empathizing through deep research, then follow with defining, ideating, prototyping, and finally testing.

Project KPI

Based on our problem statements and speaking to Hanai’s founder, the Key Performance Indicator we identified is:

• # of New Sign Ups: Hanai’s app in Malaysia, Jiwa Ibu, doesn’t have a big number of users, but the users who do have it use it frequently. The value is there, but the reach is missing. If we design a successful solution to the health information gap to women in rural Kenya, then it should result in a greater number of sign ups.

Project Scope

The scope of this project will be user interviews, secondary research, competitive analysis, lo-fi, mid-fi, hi-fi wireframing, and paper and mid-fi prototyping and testing. The end result will be an end-to-end application designed for women in rural Kenya.

Understanding the problem

Our constraints: users with varying levels of literacy and digital literacy and limited internet connection.

The methodologies I decided on are: Stakeholder Interview, Competitive Analysis, Secondary Research, User Interviews, and Usability Heuristics Evaluation.

Stakeholder Interview

I had a stakeholder interview with the founder, another intern, and Hanai’s data scientist. I asked them questions to narrow our focus, and get a sense of our expectations from each other.

The biggest insights I gained from this conversation are as follows:

• Hanai’s goal is to “empower and enable users to get healthcare access and education”

• Create a system that is easy to use and understand, and generates more users

• Eventually shrink the gap between women in the rural majority world and healthcare

• The barriers we are dealing with are largely, limited literacy and internet connection

• Our focus would be: Content Consumption, a Support Chat or FAQ, and Creating a Profile.

Click here for full interview notes

User Interviews

Recruiting participants for this study was a challenge, 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. In the end, I had Hanai find 2 individuals through NGOs they were connected to, and I reached out to my own contacts to recruit women in 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

Competitive Analysis

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

Secondary Research

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

Objectives:

• Understand the trends in healthtech today, specifically for women

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

Hypotheses:

• Healthtech for women in marginalized communities sometimes feels high maintenance and doesn’t always answer the most immediate questions

• 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

Usability Heuristics

Although there wasn’t much to work with for their current app, I conducted a usability heuristics to see what elements work and what elements need reconsidering in the new app. I considered conducting a usability test, but learned that you can identify many more areas for improvement with a usability heuristics test. I discovered the many ways in which Hanai’s app, Jiwa Ibu is not as accessible or easy to use as it could be.

Here is a snapshot of the usability heuristics evaluation:

Click here for a full view of the usability heuristics evaluation

User Persona

To fully understand the women who would be using Hanai’s app, I drew out the young learner archetype into a persona, Grace Mwende. This card covers her motivations, pains, story, affiliated brand, and gives us a clearer picture of who she is and who is at the centre of our decision making.

Empathy Map

The empathy map I created below will help me make Grace an even more 3-Dimensional idea of who she is. Especially because the demographic I am working with is so niche and specific, I thought fleshing this out was of utmost importance, to prevent any assumptions informing decisions down the road.

User Journey

Finally, I wanted to really dive into how our users might feel at each point of their journey to building a relationship with their health. This is based on user interviewees’ relationship to technology, their community, and their health.

Defining our approach

After synthesizing my research on Kenyan women’s relationship to healthcare and the constraints we’re working with in the rural majority world, I could begin to define the project goals, the exact features we will build out, and the journeys our users might take.

Project Goals

The 3 stakeholders I needed to consider when identifying the project goals were: Hanai, tech (essentially, me and the developer), and our user demographic. This will serve as my “why” throughout the entire process. Inevitably there will be steps where I’m unsure which direction to take, and in those cases, I will refer back to our goals to make sure the decisions are not arbitrary. All decisions should match these high level goals I’ve listed - namely, they should consider constraints, helping the user improve their health, and allow Hanai to become a sustainable non-profit.

Deciding on Features

How do we know which features to work on and which to omit or leave for later? In order to narrow our focus for this project, I took all the features from my competitive analysis and organized them in order of priority. P1 = high priority, a must-have, and P4 = low priority, a maybe later. The P1 priorities are the ones that I will most likely focus on, as they pertain to our users most immediate needs, while also considering our users' limitations.

Prioritizing Features

For an extra 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 even further which features need my immediate attention in regards to how directly they impact the users or Hanai as an organization.

Information Architecture

Although for this project’s scope I can’t build out each and every feature, I want to make sure there is a home for everything. This structure organization prioritizes the flows that I will cover, while also ensuring there is room for improvement and growth based on our goals in the longterm.

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?

Task Flow

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. I created the two flows. Although one of the main features we listed was a health records area, I actually decided that it was more important to build out a community forum area. After a call with the Hanai founder, we agreed to take this approach instead.

A community forum is something that all our competitors have, and is also reflective of the community aspect and word of mouth method that women in rural Kenya were used to. The first flow documents someone using the symptoms list and support chat and second is through the community forum

Sketches

The most challenging thing about sketching out the screens for this app was having to find a middle ground between being comprehensive and also being succinct. Hanai is unique in the sense that it covers healthcare in a holistic way, but also has a focus on maternal health. Most healthtech apps, African-based or not, are either one or the other, not both. How do I make sure that I cover enough for concerned mothers and mothers to be while also considering the users who won’t be using the app for maternal health?

I spent a lot of 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 minimalize the UI, and a link right to the Mother’s Community in the featured post.

In the research, and conversations with the stakeholder, having the option to listen to audio vs reading is very important. However, there is quite a lot of content and I will speak to the founder of Hanai and the team about where we can include audio options to maximize usability for our edge users.

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