Grace Experience Product & Marketing UX Design

Every girl is unique and as are the problems they face. Even Period Pal won’t be able to cover all the possible scenarios, but I still want to figure out what are the most frequent problems that may happen in 80% of female and find the a way to verify my solution and content fit their needs. After user interviews, I came up five personas. Instead of focus on product features, I tried to dive deeper into the consumer’s mindset and to figure out their most common needs and desires. When and why would they decide to see an OB/GYN? Have they ever associated their period with daily activities? How do they currently keep track?

Any habit-tracking app will request a user’s investment and involvement, so the challenge is to engage with users. Luckily, there are some internal triggers (“Today is my first day of period this month — I need to log that,” or “Today should be the first day of my period...but why hasn’t it come yet?”) Those are great natural triggers, but external triggers like notification and reminder, reward systems and better tracking in general, users will be more involved in the logging process.

I developed three versions of the UX structures, and I wanted to compare the first and the final lo-wi wireframes. The previous version landed on a calendar and tracking page directly. The main page has three functions: notification of next period, ability to track daily specifics, and ability to add/edit periods on the calendar. However, testers usually only understand one or two of these functions. Even though they may be able to guess their functions, they didn’t know how to or hesitated to click on the most dominant element on this screen — the material design principle seems to fail in this case.

As usual, I dove deeper into the logistics and user cases. My testing and research showed that most people only use the app to check when they should expect their next periods and only tracked the start date, end date, and any severe symptoms.* But around ⅔ of them expressed interest in developing a more detailed diary to track everything they’d like to make note of. Potential users are more likely to open the app for quick check — they’re more likely to look for their next period date but less likely to create a period when they’re in a rush. (To create a period, you needed a clear memory for the start and end dates and at least three clicks to finish.) After carefully analysis, I think it’s important to create a home page with the capability to track the most important start and end dates and keep more details related to tracking in other tabs. By removing the calendar, I also have more room to display the related content and, potentially, even ads.

*The results come from the eight users I interviewed and a lot of online commentary on existing apps.

I also bring alerts into a tab rather than a sub-tab below the setting to create an analytics home screen before getting into the details.