Essence App

Case Study

The Scenario

Women have a natural, and predictable, cycle that impacts how their strengths and weaknesses are manifest throughout the month. As such, they need tools to help them understand and work with their natural cycles so that they can tap into their greatest potential. 

Although there are products that aim to help women with their awareness of these changes, they are treated as an aspect of health, separate and distinct from other aspects of their lives. The fact is, the menstrual cycle affects far more than a woman’s health. It’s up to individuals to regularly track, identify, and compare monthly patterns in their mood, motivation, and productivity. Then, they have to determine if, and how, these patterns are impacting their daily lives.  

While many apps track and account for these trends, there isn’t an app to account for how hormonal changes may impact the plans for each day. Other products manage and organize time, create task lists, and enhance productivity. Despite their best efforts, the implications of hormonal changes are simply not accounted for in these products.

The Essence app provides a solution as it brings menstrual cycle awareness and daily planning together.

The greatest challenge in this project was determining how to display scheduling information alongside relevant cycle data in a simple, digestible way without overwhelming users. 

Primary Research 

I began my research learning how people generally plan and what impact their cycle has on their daily lives. 

Interviews

I interviewed women between the ages of 25-40. I focused on how these women planned and organized their time. These interviews, due to Covid-19, were all conducted through video conferencing. I included mothers and working professionals in my research group to see how (and if) these women planned differently.

Diary Study

I tucked my initial findings aside and began focusing my research on periods and menstrual cycles. 

Methodology

I conducted a 5-week diary study with family and friends. I began the diary study with a background survey that allowed me to gather information about opinions and mental models of participants regarding their menstrual cycle. To maintain active participation and obtain digestible data, I created Google surveys for participants to complete. Every other day participants answered the same questions regarding their mood, motivation, and feelings. Each week participants indicated where they were in their cycle. That way, data from each woman’s cycle day 1 could be compared between participants despite the day of the diary study. 

Key Findings

• I found that all participants considered their period to be synonymous with their menstrual cycle. 
• Only those who struggled with fertility or were using natural means of contraception also considered ovulation as a part of the menstrual cycle. 
• No participants considered implications of their menstrual cycle beyond what corresponded with ovulation or bleeding.

These findings confirm the disconnection between daily life and one’s menstrual cycle.

Additional Research

Now that I had a perspective about how women plan and the impact of menstruation, I found additional perspectives through secondary and competitive research, shown below. In my secondary research, I needed to further understand how to effectively consider menstruation while planning and working to enhance one’s life. In my competitive research, I looked at competitor’s apps to understand the standards and expectations of early adopters.

Key Findings 

Since menstrual cycles affect so many things in women’s daily lives, they need to be thinking about them more than once a month. They need to be aware of them more constantly.

The problem is that for most women the term menstrual cycle often equates to nothing more than the period and ovulation. 

Competitive Research 

As I compared various period tracking apps I was unable to find any app that integrated with a traditional calendar. The apps were either specifically dedicated to tracking data about periods or they were part of tracking other health information. I observed that period apps vary in their purposes. While some focus on symptoms others focus on ovulation. Yet others focus on cycle education and building community with other women. Despite these differences, they all have ways to track information, usually with a combination of icons and text. I implemented this in my design, opting for sliders and buttons with icons to represent information to be tracked. 

Cycle Effects Survey

Determining what would be important in tracking a cycle was almost overwhelming because of the possibilities of data that could be tracked. I didn’t want users to feel overwhelmed when tracking their lives. I knew including period symptoms and emotions would be important, but I wasn’t sure what else other people cared about. I didn’t want to assume that users cared about the same things I did, so I conducted a Google survey. 

I had a list of things I considered important based on personal experience and my secondary research from Claire Baker. I asked “When considering how your menstrual hormones affect other aspects of your life, what aspects do you find most important to understand?” My list included 12 options.  I asked participants to select all aspects that were important to them. I also asked an open-ended question to allow participants to add or clarify their response.  

Key Findings 

From the Menstrual Cycle Effects survey, I found that energy level was just as important as mood as it related to hormone changes.

In addition, over 30% of the women wanted to know how their stress, food cravings, motivation, and sex drive were impacted by their menstrual cycles.

Less than 30% found other aspects, like food aversions and hours of sleep, impactful when related to their cycles. I included all aspects that more than 30% of women valued in my design.

In addition, I recognized that my survey group was disproportionately abstinent from sex. This, I concluded, would likely have decreased the percentage of participants who cared to track sex drive. For this reason, I also included sex drive as an important aspect to track.

I considered how the aspects I included compared to the four categories Baker recommends charting.  I realized there was one important aspect none of my data considered.

According to Baker, women’s mental, emotional, and spiritual attributes determine whether they are feeling more or less social.

Based on Baker’s findings, I chose to include sociability as another point of data for users to track. 

Empathy Maps

Once I’d compiled this data I created several empathy maps in order to understand the types of users I had. I also wanted to understand the underlying (even subconscious) motivations behind what research participants were doing and saying.  My research participants fit into two groups of women I’d interviewed: those focused on their career and those focused on their family. Their thoughts and behaviors differed, as did their motivations. These differences became the basis for the empathy maps representing each group. 

In an effort to discover similar data I attempted to make additional empathy maps expressing the thoughts, feelings, words, and actions of my diary study participants. However, a key aspect of my project was the changes in each aspect over time. I knew a traditional empathy map was insufficient since I needed a way to express the changes in thoughts, words, feelings, and actions over the course of a menstrual cycle. I found a creative writer’s usage of empathy maps demonstrating how to use an empathy map to track character changes over time.

Based on this information, I broke my empathy map into 4 phases, representing the 4 phases of the menstrual cycle.

Key Findings

I found distinct changes in mood and behavior directly before and directly after the period. 

• Directly before their period women were more unmotivated, irritable, and tired.
• Once they began their period there was a release of stress. Some women explained how starting their period helped them realize why they had been so stressed and irritable the previous few days.
• After their period ended women were more energetic. They felt more capable and glad to be done bleeding.
• About two weeks after their period began (during ovulation) the women felt less stress. Often, they felt most productive during this time. This would be the end of one cycle before they drop back into lack of motivation, irritability, and exhaustion. 

Conclusion

Although I began with the idea to create a better planner, I quickly transitioned into creating a product that wouldn’t just help women plan their tasks more effectively, but also help them to live more fully as they develop an awareness of their menstrual cycle and how it influences their productivity. 

Personas: Planning and Cycles Become One

To represent the data I’d gathered I separated the culmination of my data into three groups: young women between 12-18, women focused on careers between 19-40, and women focused on families between 19-40. 

When considering the thoughts and focus of my users I recognized that, although girls as young as 11 may begin their period, they are not likely to be scheduling appointments and to-do tasks or using apps to manage their time. This likely wouldn’t start to happen for girls until the age of 16 when they begin to drive and have more responsibilities with work, school, friends, and activities.

I also realized that women between 19-25 have more in common with their younger cohort than those near 40.  These women are focused on their own development through education and experiences. Generally, it isn’t until around the age of 25 that women begin changing their focus toward careers or families. 

These conclusions were based on assumptions from my personal experience as well as observations from my diary study, my nieces, friends, and other women in my community. Although further research would help confirm these assumptions, given the time constraints I felt confident using my experiences to make reliable decisions regarding details of these groups.

Using these considerations and data I created personas. My personas represented 3 groups: 16-25 year-olds exploring opportunities, 26-40 year-olds focused on careers, and 26-40 year-olds focused on families.

The personas included the perspective each woman has regarding periods as well as the technology she typically uses to plan.

Initial  Design

With my personas in place, I was ready to move toward product development.

Based on my research I knew there were three important things I needed to include: cycle information, a schedule, and a to-do list.

The distinction between the to-do list and the schedule was important to allow for quick, easy-to-add tasks, enabling users to add tasks for the day without getting bogged down in what details may or may not be needed. 

Unlike other apps, I wanted to help users understand patterns in productivity throughout their cycle, not merely during their period. This meant I needed to include information that was impacted throughout the cycle and represent a comparison of this data between cycles. This was challenging. 

Although I considered having 3 separate dashboards for each element (schedule, tasks, and cycle details) I knew that users would need to see them together in order to see how they interconnect. If they were all on separate screens, then cycle details may be entirely neglected because so many women think of “period” as the only stage of their menstrual cycle. By adding all three aspects to the same screen women would be able to begin connecting and relating these three aspects together, rather than thinking of them separately.

To add femininity and playfulness, I chose pink as my secondary color. As I designed, it became clear I needed an additional accent color to help differentiate some information. For this, I chose a pale yellow to add vibrancy and vitality. 

I chose iconography that was visually simple without becoming animated or cartoon like.

Testing and Iteration

Guerilla Testing

Based on results from guerrilla testing, I learned that users didn’t understand the scale that I’d created regarding various aspects of the cycle. They also reported that all the data from the cycle was overwhelming and made it hard to understand the other info on the screen.

As a result, I decided to include the top 4 aspects (as determined by the survey) on the main screen and save the rest for another screen.

I also confirmed that the clear indication of the days until their next period was an important/favorite element among users. Users were also happy to have a to-do list separate from their calendar. 

User Tests

Using InVision I created a prototype of my hi-fi designs to use in user testing. As I completed my first round of user tests, I observed that it was difficult for users to understand the connection and purpose of the dashboard chart comparing their cycle day to the previous month. On other screens I had tips and text explaining what to expect in the coming days.

Over half of the participants expressed how beneficial this text was. Based on these cues from users, I eliminated the difficult to differentiate chart and let the text speak for itself, as seen below. 

Upon completion of the user testing, it became clear this last-minute decision was a bad decision. Users consistently struggled to find items located in the “Mental” category. I retested with the titles “Vital”, “Emotions”, “Period Symptoms,” and “Food Cravings.” This little change only served to make the problem more complicated. 

I reverted back to my original design with the outlier elements on the main tracking screen. Immediately, users were able to find the information they were looking for. It was much more intuitive, and users were able to track their day more quickly. 

Next Steps

In order to refine this project, there are a few considerations that need to be worked out before users will be able to intuitively navigate the app.

Problem One

Users struggled to know how to return to the home page after expanding the dashboard.

Observations and Solutions

Adding a “home” button or creating a button from the logo at the top of the screen may solve this problem.

Alternately, expanding screens may not be necessary if users could scroll within each section.

A more advanced prototype may also demonstrate that the prototype was at fault, preventing users from returning home in this way. However, most users did not attempt to swipe down to return home, so another solution should be considered. 

Problem Two

Recording daily information is still somewhat confusing to users.

Observations and Solutions

It seems those who quickly and correctly find this location usually do so through a process of elimination or out of familiarity with other cycle tracking apps.

Changing the cycle tracking icon may help differentiate this, but an on-boarding process should be considered and created first.

Conclusion

After several user research activities (interviews, diary studies, and surveys) it was clear that three aspects would be integral to this product: cycle details, scheduling, and tasks. Through user testing, I learned what data was most important to users and how to remove clutter to communicate the relevance of cycle information, regardless of where women were in their cycle. 

When I shared my concept and design with colleagues and user testing participants, I was astonished at how many wanted this app now.

One participant stated, “You took three apps I use regularly and combined them all into one.”

This isn’t just a good idea, it’s one that people want.

Transferable Skills

Beyond designing a beneficial app (seriously, one test participant commented that I’d combined 3 apps she regularly uses into one and multiple friends asked when the product would be live) But, beyond, that, I learned some valuable lessons that can be applied to any project. 

Keep Things Simple

More complex designs are often appealing to designers and companies because they’re unique and often sleek, but they’re usually less intuitive. 

User Testing is Critical

I learned so much from my users because I talked to them before the design was final. I wasn’t just guessing at what to change or improve. I knew what to change, not because something looked bad, but because something worked way less efficiently than I’d anticipated. I was able to fix and simplify things before spending the time, money, and energy on a design that, ultimately, confused users. 

Iterate Constantly

Now, this is closely tied to user testing, but it needs to be said. If we test but don’t change our design, then the test is useless. We have to iterate and change our design based on what we learn from our users. I hope that this project helps you understand my creative process.