Companion Project

Companion is a mobile app concept that connects pregnant women in your local area to provide emulation & support to engage in physical activities, exercises during different stages of pregnancy.

Brief: As a part of HCI course at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Companion was created as the final coursework submission. The problem brief given to us was to improve or aid the experience of women during their pregnancy period.

UX Group: Clement Hamon, Mikko Honkanen, Mohit Yadav, Yash Todar

Stages

Understanding the key points

Researched about pregnancy through primary & secondary sources from our mothers, grandmothers, the internet, pregnancy gyms & women who are in different stages of pregnancy. This helped us to familiarize with the subject firstly and also assisted us to design the later part of the mobile app concept.

We discovered through the initial interviews, that often women are told to exercise during pregnancy by the doctors.This was a great point to base our app concept around. On researching further, we understood what were the benefits of exercise during pregnancy. Also, that it reduces the need of C-Section.

The pain point was however, being consistent in physical activity. And, there had to be different exercises based on different stages of pregnancy which had to be adapted.

Brainstorming and Ideation

We brainstormed few ideas on the white board. Some ideas included partnering with other people around, going to the gym together, finding other people to exercise with, challange your friends & so. We sketched these ideas and developed some of them to further create this concept of Companion.

Design

Our main points to keep in mind while we designed were:

To create a sporty emulation & social grouping for pregnant women
To challenge other pregnant women & share experiences
To challenge other pregnant women & share experiences
To link with other pregnant women having similar interests in physical activities
To provide guides for different exercises for different levels of pregnancy
To show milestones for a challenge or activity to indicate progress.

We went through several refinement of paper prototypes before refining the UI & creating an interactive prototype using Powerpoint

Profile Page

Account Creation

Connecting with other Users

Challenge View

Invite View

Tracking View

Testing & Evaluation

We conducted usability evaluation with 5 pregnant users for 3 rounds. Which included mothers having kids already, someone in her 6th month of pregnancy and also thought to diversify the sample by having users who aren’t pregnant yet but might be expecting in sometime.

Usability Testing

We understood that the former group of pregnant women would be more likely to be interested in using it on a regular basis. While we conducted the evaluation, we had different set of tasks to give to the user.

To add & challenge other profiles from the list
Navigate through different functions of creating an account
View challenges & log out

During the evaluation, we in turns took different roles of greeter, facilitator, computer, & observer.

Conclusion

This project was an enjoyable experience, understanding the different stages of pregnancy & how difficult it is during those stages. The group dynamics was something that we as a team enjoyed.

We argued and had conflicts at points where it was needed & towards the end, we all played our part well in achieving a good prototype for the app concept. If we were to do this project differently , we could have involved more users right at the conceptual phases rather than while approaching them for the interviews seeking insights or at the interface design stage & hoped to even add a stronger base for building this type of idea/product.

Learning outcomes: Knowledge about pregnancy, user centered design, user research, usability testing & rapid prototyping.