Brazen
We built a consumer brand that women can trust throughout their reproductive lifecycle. By grounding our business in research and a strong, modern brand, we stand out in a crowded marketplace of half-measures and insufficient solutions. We’ve created a line of customized supplements to target specific patterns of symptoms and built an online program that does more than track your period — it actually fixes it.
The Problem: How do you address stigmatized, but ubiquitous menstrual issues like PMS and period pain that affect more than 80% of reproductive aged women?
The Solution: By being Brazen. We built a consumer brand that women can trust throughout their reproductive lifecycle. By grounding our business in research and a strong, modern brand, we stand out in a crowded marketplace of half-measures and insufficient solutions. We’ve created a line of customized supplements to target specific patterns of symptoms and built an online program that does more than track your period — it actually fixes it.
My Role: Head of Product
Personalized solutions to global problems
Understanding how to serve our customers meant understanding the global context of the problem we were trying to solve, but also understanding what made each one of our customers tick. We synthesized census data, research from the National Institutes of Health, and existing industry data to paint a picture of a national health crisis that has been largely ignored. With more than 80% of women experiencing moderate to severe period problems, we set out to examine how these problems were currently being solved. The answer: they weren’t.
We investigated how people with periods managed their symptoms with existing digital solutions, over-the-counter medications, and even homespun remedies from mom or grandma. Developing a broad research-based understanding of our problem allowed us to identify opportunities for differentiation and steered development direction.
We followed high-level research with problem interviews to build a deep personal understanding of how menstrual problems affected women on a daily basis. These interviews allowed us to build true-to-life personas and identify key demographics that didn’t just want, but needed our services. Our personas acted as guide posts throughout the design process and allowed us to anticipate and design for problems and edge cases before we started user testing.
Design process
My process begins with identifying key feature sets that our primary personas will rely on to achieve their goals, not just within the product, but in their lives. Once these feature sets have been validated with key stakeholders, I turn to pen and paper for rapid prototyping and brainstorming sessions with product, marketing, content, and business teams. This process creates buy-in and excitement across our organization as we shepherd our key features along and get valuable feedback on the business case for our product.
After initial brainstorming, lo-fi digital prototyping creates a system for another round or problem interviews where our team proposes a solution. Not only does this generate valuable feedback, but it identifies hand raisers for early testing. User testing at this stage is key to making sure that needs are being met and identifies areas of potential confusion or frustration. This process also allows our dev team to being to scope the project, investigate functionality, document features, and allocate resources.
Once our lo-fi system has been validated, hi-fi designs are tested as we integrate brand identity into our products.
Visual Identity
Product research informs more than just product design. During our user interviews, we found that users were frequently turned off by products that focused stereotypically feminine themes (pink and flowery). This was especially true of gender expansive or non-binary people with periods that felt largely ignored by current products. This informed our design process, not just for our technology product, but also for our web properties and CPG products.
Brazen means acting with strength while overcoming something difficult or shameful. Our goal is for people with periods everywhere to be open, honest and real about what they are going through, to be loud and relentless about ending the stigma surrounding period talk. We want women to feel proud and energized by our brand.
The Brazen App is currently in development. Website will be built on Wordpress and will be available at foreverbrazen.com. CPG are also currently in production.
Conceivable
“Conceivable’s new app puts a fertility clinic in your pocket.” - TechCrunch
The Problem: How do you transform a brick-and-mortar fertility wellness clinic into a digital-first solution that you can put into the hands of millions of infertile couples?
The Solution: It’s Conceivable. We worked with patients, clinicians, and digital-only consumers to create a solution that outperformed our clinical models. We analyzed nearly a quarter million data points to create a program that generated pregnancy rates more than 250% higher than natural averages, all while creating heathy behaviors and without pharmaceuticals. Daily engagement rates topped 80% by giving women the information that they needed, exactly when the needed it.
“Conceivable’s new app puts a fertility clinic in your pocket.”
— TechCrunch
The Problem: How do you transform a brick-and-mortar fertility wellness clinic into a digital-first solution that you can put into the hands of millions of infertile couples?
The Solution: It’s Conceivable. We worked with patients, clinicians, and digital-only consumers to create a solution that outperformed our clinical models. We analyzed nearly a quarter million data points to create a program that generated pregnancy rates more than 250% higher than natural averages, all while creating heathy behaviors and without pharmaceuticals. Daily engagement rates topped 80% by giving women the information they needed, exactly when they needed it.
My Role: Product and Content Lead
Understanding the clinical experience.
Mapping clinical education and data collection. While clinical progress updates took 20 minutes or more, we reduced data collection to just a few minutes a day.
The idea for Conceivable was simple: How do you take a successful clinical practice and scale it with technology so millions of infertile couples can access a suite of science-backed tools to improve their fertility, naturally? To accomplish this goal, we brought together a diverse team of clinicians, designers, and technologists to produce a product that literally changed lives.
As the design team laid the visual foundation for the brand, our product team started by breaking down every aspect of the existing clinical system. From a patient’s first phone call to their experience in the treatment room, we wanted to understand each experience. We used this experience research to build an understanding of how health care providers and patients exchanged knowledge and to identify key areas where trust, relationships, and education were built or destroyed. We interviewed dozens of clinicians and patients to address their needs, desires, and frustrations with the current clinical experience.
Key takeaways:
In-person clinicians were generally good at building trust, but often missed opportunities to educate patients.
Moreover, patient education ended at the treatment room door. Opportunities for learning, understanding, and behavior change were non-existent after hours.
Clinicians spent the majority of their time collecting and analyzing data instead of “treating” the patient. Clinicians often struggled to quickly and systematically assimilate diagnostic info and relied on shaky patient data recall. Providers needed a way to cut through the fog and collect the same data over time in order to track patient progress and reassess treatment plans.
Technology creates an opportunity for change.
When we built Conceivable, we didn’t just want to recreate the clinical experience; we wanted to make it better. We recognized that technology gave us a new way to interact with patients. Instead of weekly or monthly “brain dumps” between patient and practitioner, real time responses to patient-tracked data meant that patients received ongoing, vital information in real time. This allowed us to create education plans for patients to keep them involved in their care and help them make healthy lifestyle changes over time. Our algorithms helped to triage symptoms and modify treatment plans in real time.
Practitioner-approved content. User-centered design.
Conceivable gives users easy access to their own data, plus education and personal insights.
Our key metrics of success for Conceivable were when patient’s adopted new habits, changed to more healthy lifestyles, and got pregnant. We identified patient education as a crucial aspect in compelling sometimes difficult lifestyle changes (smoking cessation, healthy eating, or stress reduction). While practitioners tended to shower their patients with their depth of understanding, patients quickly became overwhelmed and had difficulty retaining information. At Conceivable, we adopted a “just-in-time” system for delivering education. We wrote hundreds of science-backed and easily digestible articles that were distributed to patients according to either time- or action-based cues.
Conceivable also gave patients a way to track the data that were most important to them. We evaluated existing period tracking apps to identify areas for improvement. While most apps allowed users to track fundamental data, such as date of their last period, uncomfortable menstrual symptoms, or even their basal body temperatures, these apps failed to answer important questions for users — specifically, “What does it all mean?” To address this shortcoming of other apps, Conceivable provided educational articles to users around their tracked data, as well as rolled this data into an overall score that gave users a clinically relevant indicator of their progress in the program.
Results
Biometric data tracking
During our beta program, we collected more than 240,000 data points on lifestyle factors, general wellness, menstrual health, and conception chances. In addition to understanding how our users interacted with Conceivable, we evaluated whether Conceivable was producing clinically meaningful results. Conceivable not only kept 80% of our users engaged on a daily basis, but we produced a 22% percent pregnancy rate which beat our clinical success rates. For women with the lowest chances of conceiving naturally, Conceivable had the most pronounced effect, with women aged 35-39 seeing a 167% higher than average success rate for their age and women aged 40-44 seeing a whopping 260% higher success rate.
In addition to their fertility results, our users saw increases in other essential measures of menstrual and overall health. On average, our users experienced more than a 50% decrease in uncomfortable menstrual symptoms like PMS and period pain.
Perhaps our biggest accomplishment was helping users increase healthy behaviors. For example, we saw a 43% increase in the number of servings of vegetables consumed and a 35% reduction in stress.
Conceivable was named a winner for Healthline’s Best Fertility Apps of 2016.
What I learned:
In-depth UX research is critical to understanding both strengths and weakness in current models, as well as key opportunities for innovation and change.
A good solution must balance product efficacy with user engagement. It doesn’t matter how well your product works if a user won’t keep using it. Content and programming that engage a user at the point of tracking spur engagement and reduce churn.
How do be a fluid translator among parties with different experiences, expertise, and interests. As the product lead, I was in constant dialog with key stakeholders (clinicians and patients), business leadership, marketing, biz dev, design team, content team, and product developers.
Conceivable in the press:
