Jamie Thomson Pate

User Experience Designer

Context

In 2011, the rates of C-sections, maternal death, and other childbirth complications were on the rise, and two nonprofits – the Informed Medical Decisions Foundation (IMDF) and Childbirth Connection – partnered to find a way to make an impact on the statistics. They came to Mad*Pow for help in defining an intervention strategy and designing an engaging solution that would equip and empower women to make shared decisions with their doctors.

Team & Role

This was my first project at Mad*Pow, but it remains one of my favorites because the clients and subject matter were so inspiring. It also shows how from day 1 at Mad*Pow I was providing value – I started out providing research support for team leads Megan Grocki and Dan Berlin, but my role quickly expanded to include design studio facilitation, journey mapping, strategy documentation, prototyping, visual design collaboration, and development documentation.

Pregnancy is a huge, often overwhelming learning experience. Our data showed that though most women were going online frequently looking for answers, everyone has a different tolerance level for information:

“Some of my friends took birthing classes to learn about all the variables and choices, and they said in hindsight they didn’t need it—it’s either scary or just too much.”– Interview participant

“Getting to learn that my options in labor aren’t as narrow as ‘go to hospital, bend over, take whatever they say to take because they know better’ was very freeing and enlightening.”– Survey participant

An important design principle that I drew out of this research was, “Promote awareness of choice without overwhelming.”

Fully marinated in insights, I distilled the patterns in our research into four personas. Each persona had a journey narrative that depicted a present-day story, and a future story where the user encountered our solution. I designed these documents to be more narrative-based than a typical journey map to make sure I was capturing the level of detail the team needed – both in terms of design concepts and the emotional value of the stories we heard during research. This format also helped us collaborate more directly with our expert clients, as they could edit the Word Document directly.

While the solution would ultimately be a website, the most important part to get right was the decision aid template, which would help a woman walk through one specific decision to understand the options and medical evidence, reflect on her priorities, and prepare to discuss it with her doctor or midwife.

I wanted the movement from one step in the decision aid to the next to be as frictionless as possible, so my prototype was a single page with sections that expanded down as the user progressed through the different activities.