Empowering Expecting Mothers in India
Platform
Mobile Application
Services
Strategy & Design, User Interface Design, Interaction Design
Client
Avegen & Merck Pharmaceuticals
Overview
“Together for Her” is an online platform that empowers expecting mothers. It helps them discover the right care-provider for their maternity needs and find relevant, trustworthy information. It empowers women to rate care providers for their delivery experience which in turn helps lawmakers to craft sensitive and community friendly regulations.
Brief
Merck Pharmaceuticals initiated a project called "Together for her" with Digital India Initiative along with a healthcare technology partner in India(Avegen) and also involving Melinda Gates Foundation. The program aimed at helping expecting mothers ranging from the ill served tier 3 cities , rural parts of the country to tier 1 metro cities. "Together for Her" chose us as their Product strategy & design partner. The primary objectives were to help expecting mothers onboard the platform with ease while understanding the value proposition, to engage and retain them by creating relevance based on their trimesters and due dates and to delight them to evangelise the platform for other expecting mothers.
Major Challenges
The team had to design solutions for a wide range of demographics including expecting women and hospitals/clinics (Tier 1, 2 and 3 cities) in India.
To be sensitive towards the native users in tier-2 and 3 cities extending to rural parts of the country. Also create a design system that can have different scripts and languages without compromising on the design layouts.
Rethinking online reviews to make them central to the ecosystem.
Design strategy to align with the content strategy for maximum value generation and sustained engagement. Diverse needs of expecting women at different stages of their pregnancy journey.
To align with too many on-ground and in-house diverse teams working towards the common experience.
Key Interventions
“Together for Her” was a one of its kind at inception and our team participated and executed various processes and worked alongside the content, marketing, and technology team to create the best experience for expecting mothers. The following are a few critical areas of our intervention.
Primary & Secondary User Understanding
The team used proprietary user understanding templates to identify the underlying needs of the end-users. Also, the team participated and worked with a dedicated user research team to uncover critical insights on expecting mothers and the care providers.
"Together for Her" is a service that is a balance of digital and offline interaction with its customers. A detailed customer journey mapping identified and allowed designing for all touch points, including the front-stage and back-stage service touch points. This mapping helped the design team identify weak areas during the customers’ journey and helped identify areas of intervention to create an excellent experience for expecting mothers.
Customer Journey Mapping
The team crafted a robust product strategy, taking into account the vision of the product, its eventual goal of helping the expecting mothers make an informed decision, and providing the regulators with quality care data for drafting citizen-friendly policies. With these goals in mind, the team created a product design roadmap considering the needs of end-users and care-providers.
Digital Product Strategy
With a clear roadmap, defined outcomes, and detailed personas of the expecting mothers, the team designed the platform as a responsive web product with a robust and scalable Information Architecture. And, easy to use designs by creating universal interaction paradigms looking at the nature of the end-users. It also made sure the product structure can maintain regional languages of the country and that it is easy for the not so tech-savvy mothers to adapt to the interaction paradigms.
Interaction & Interface Design
With a clear roadmap, defined outcomes, and detailed personas of the expecting mothers, the team designed the platform as a responsive web product with a robust and scalable Information Architecture. And, easy to use designs by creating universal interaction paradigms looking at the nature of the end-users. It also made sure the product structure can maintain regional languages of the country and that it is easy for the not so tech-savvy mothers to adapt to the interaction paradigms.
Collaboration with Content
Collaboration with Brand & Marketing Team
To create a holistic customer experience, the product design team needs to be in line with the brand positioning and marketing strategies. The design team collaborated with the brand and marketing team with photography and illustration styles, colour palettes, design of the marketing communications, story-telling for expecting mothers, and blog style.
Key Highlights
The expecting mothers came from diverse backgrounds in the country's culturally diverse states; this called for more options to share feedback as per their comfort and convenience. "Together for Her" recorded feedback in audio, video, and text format. This empowered mothers from Tier-1 to Tier-3 cities to be comfortable in sharing their experiences.
Diverse Feedback Options
General reviews are very open-ended and seldom produce structured data that the brand can leverage to improve or strategise. The platform allows mothers to rate the care provider on 10 WHO parameters, that make the collective data more relevant, actionable, and easily comparable for new expecting mothers on the platform.
Common Feedback Parameters
The expecting mothers are at different points in their maternity journey and so are their information needs. The platform maintains information about the mothers and tailors highly personalised information for effective maternity care. This content is delivered via different mediums at the right time, and the engagement is measured to produce relevant content further.
Personalised Content
The clinics/hospitals can manage the women who gave birth at their facilities and their reviews on their experience. The detailed data at different touch points help them improve their services.
Hospital/Clinic Review Management System
The care providers like maternity clinics and hospitals have their dedicated profile pages, which becomes a single source of truth for all expecting mothers. The clinics/hospitals manage the latest information, services, reviews, etc. on the platform and are motivated to have the best foot forward because of fear of missing out.
Care Providers Profile Pages
The search for the right care provider is designed as a map-based interface that makes it easy for the users to factor in diverse pointers that they consider before choosing a provider. In a new city, it also becomes an excellent tool for users to reference their residence location.