final concept: pillar
Problem
Currently first time mothers during the first 100 days post child birth receive little to no support for maternal mental health, they more often than not, feel disconnected from their previous life, their partner, their own body. Through people centered research approach I wanted to design something to help add additional support to this feeling of disconnection.
How it works
Through a simple onboarding chatbot that is affiliated with SMS and fb messenger, the women can easily access the service providing more personalized answers to questions in order to better match them. From my research I found they didn't want to download another pregnancy app so this was a low-entry barrier that was inclusively designed.
In order to focus on using the data to improve positive impact, I co-created the language and tone of the service with the women so that the chatbot would feel as trustworthy as possible, questions like; do you breastfeed/were you induced/if you could ask your future self one question what would it be/if you could offer a piece of advice to your past self what would it be. The data then lives on the pillar server and once matched will be re-directed to their own personal secure chatroom, where the women also have the choice to enter this service anonymous, or foster long-term relations with each other, all depending on the needs of the women.
Concept
pillar is your life coach community, during the first 100 days of childbearing and beyond.
A layer of additional support outside of the current healthcare system offerings, currently these women are assigned a mother group from birth that is around 3 data points; location, time of birth, and if you are a first-time mother. So what is the next phase of mother groups, and how would that look in a digital context where we could expand the data point and match women to women experiencing much more similar situations and ultimately getting more concise and better support.
pillar connects first-time mothers to women 1 step ahead of them to gain advice and 1 step behind them to give advice going through similar experiences. Playing on this idea of mentor and mentee pillar empowers women to be ok with feeling insecure about motherhood but confident about where they were yesterday.
User testimonials
To find out more:
- Initial Research Methods
- Design Challenge
- Initial In-Depth Interviews: Data Matching
- Experience Prototyping: Wrappers and Value Proposition
- User Testing: Content and Conversational Style
- Building the back-end.
- Validated Concept
- Final Product: www.ourpillar.com