OBie: Simplifying Filipina Reproductive Health — A UX Case Study
Over the past few years, I’ve been asked countless questions on reproductive health while working with Amarela, Dima Health, and the UNFPA.
“How can I go on the pill? Is this safe?”
“I think I’m pregnant but I can’t go out to buy a test, what can I do?”
“My mom won’t let me go to the OB-Gynecologist but my period is irregular. How can I see one?”
I try my best to help everyone, but it’s tiring and disheartening to see so many women struggling to fulfill their reproductive health needs. So when my partner, Alex Martin, and I joined UX University 2021 and found out that one of the prompts was linked to healthcare accessibility, I knew that I wanted to create a design solution focused on reproductive health.
Each UX Uni contestant was asked to go through a UX research and design process, with the help of the various workshops and mentors assigned to us. With this case competition being Alex and I’s first ever UX case study, we were unsure on what to do at the beginning. We didn’t know much about the design thinking process and I only knew the basics of Figma. Surprisingly, we were able to win second place overall despite going into the competition with zero experience.
To start off our research, Alex and I narrowed down our possible problems to one main topic, “The Complexities of Accessing Women’s Reproductive Health Services in the Philippines”. To look further into this issue, we wanted to identify the different goals, motivations, and frustrations of our stakeholders when accessing these services, as well as their expectations, problem areas, pain points, and short-term and long-term goals.
We interviewed beginner patients, experienced patients, and OB-Gynecologists. Our participants were asked about their experiences with RH and their goals, motivations, and frustrations with accessing these services. My partner and I also conducted an online survey with 30 female participants who were asked about their experiences with reproductive health and the opinions they have regarding the state of reproductive health in the country.
From these interviews and surveys, we were able to come up with four key takeaways:
- Many women neglect their own reproductive health needs because they don’t know where to begin when accessing RH services.
- Women would like to consult with an OB-Gynecologist but get discouraged because of the inconvenient booking process.
- Information on available OB-Gynecologists such as their services, price points, location, and contact info needs to be more accessible to everyone.
- Doctors feel that time is wasted on getting their patient’s health background during consultations since this information can be gathered before the appointment starts.
These are the different ideas and perspectives gathered from our participants. I, along with Alex, understand their plight. It’s crazy to see how we all agree on the same thing — that there is an overwhelming number of women that are unsatisfied with women’s reproductive health services in the Philippines.
User Personas and Journey Maps
To further understand the thoughts and feelings of our stakeholders, we created personas and journey maps in order to emphasize with their goals, motivations, and frustrations.
Virgin Marie is an 18 year-old college student that hasn’t been to the OB-Gyne but is thinking about being proactive regarding her reproductive health. However, her conservative family, limited awareness on seeking services, and the pandemic prevents her from doing so.
Marie expects to easily find a doctor but finding information online, selecting a doctor, and booking a consultation is difficult. An opportunity here is to create an online platform with a list of services and information on OB-Gynecologists.
Sexually Active Sophie in her late twenties and wants to maintain her PCOS, avoid contracting COVID-19, and avoid unwanted pregnancies to focus on her marriage and career. Her OB-Gynecologist doesn’t have an online platform and can only have physical consultations, and prescriptions for her PCOS treatment aren’t easy to obtain.
She expects a quick appointment but is frustrated due to many reasons such as: having to take a COVID test, driving to the hospital, and taking many measures to get a prescription. This gives us the opportunity to create a virtual platform for a more convenient medium of consultation between patients and doctors; also allowing patients to obtain prescriptions, without having to physically go to a clinic.
Lastly, Tita Julie is an OB-Gynecologist that wants to establish good doctor-patient relationships, provide accessible services, and ensure the overall health and well-being of her patients. At the moment, consults are hard to book due to lack of awareness regarding the booking process, and too much time is spent on getting a patient’s health background during consultations instead of it being done beforehand.
She expects to have a quick and clear consultation process but is frustrated again with the time being spent on a patient’s health history. This grants the opportunity to create a pre-consultation questionnaire regarding a patient’s health history, their background information, and why they plan on consulting. This would save time during consultations for a more productive and efficient conversation based on the patient’s concerns.
Our Solution
With the different insights from our participants in mind, we decided to create an online women’s reproductive health platform named OBie that aims to make the booking process for reproductive health services more convenient and accessible to Filipinos.
Based on the suggestions and recommendations of our participants, we planned on our platform being able to do the following:
- User questionnaires where patients would put their complete health history and reasons for consulting.
- Online database where users can find different OB-Gynecologists and their services.
- A booking feature so patients can book appointments conveniently and doctors would receive bookings instantly.
- Allow for doctors and patients to connect with one another, fulfilling patients’ health needs and providers’ obligations.
Additionally, we created use cases that state what patients and doctors would be able to achieve with our platform.
From these use cases, we crafted different user flows and an overall information architecture for OBie.
Wireframing
With the features and content of our solution settled, our team started wireframing through Figma. Below are our first drafts versus our final drafts for the wireframes.
Prototyping and Testing
We created our prototype using Figma and wanted to keep the website simple and easy to navigate, while also being aesthetically pleasing. We decided to utilize shadows, rounded squares, and other elements to maintain the clean style of the website. We also decided main color to be pink — with this color commonly being used for OB-Gynecologist scrubs. Our team kept our color palette and fonts consistent. With the limited timeframe, we were not able to add different color modes — especially those that would allow visually impaired and colorblind people to navigate the site easier. We do intend to include this feature for our actual website.
You can view our prototype walkthrough below for an in-depth tour of OBie.
After making our prototype, we continued to usability tests to ensure that our prototype was simple and easy to use. We conducted remote monitored and in-person sessions, with the following objectives:
- Determine if users can successfully and conveniently navigate around the design solution.
- Identify the points of improvement for our design solution based on participant recommendations.
- Learn if the design solution successfully provides more accessibility to women’s reproductive health services.
We asked four patients and four OB-Gynecologists to participate in our test sessions. During the session, we asked each participant to accomplish five tasks based on their user profile. These tasks were asked to see if they could go through our prototype with these objectives in mind.
To measure their performance and the usability of our prototype, we used different key performance indicators. The ones we used and their respective results are found below.
Based on our usability tests, we concluded that OBie is simple to understand and easy to navigate around, is easily accessible, and is comprehensive and informative. However, we did receive some feedback from our participants on how to improve our prototype.
Recommendations and Feedback
- Improve or remove the search bar feature for finding doctors & services.
- Include statistics and graphs for our users, which would allow them to assess their activity quantitatively.
- Have “sticky notes” for doctors announcements so their patients could be updated on their activity.
- Adjust the fonts and colors of our prototype.
- Improve the calendar and its quality.
We appreciate all the feedback from our participants and recognize that their suggestions would help improve our prototype. We decided to use these recommendations so that our design solution was made as accessible as possible to our potential users.
Moving on from our recommendations, we’d like to also highlight the positive feedback we’ve received from the participants of our interviews and surveys.
Collectively, from the beginner patients to the OB-Gynecologists, they all agree that this prototype would make multiple women’s lives easier; for both doctors and patients. According to them, OBie would be a great solution in regards to the current state of women’s reproductive health in the Philippines.
So with all our findings, our team can conclude that OBie allows for:
- Increased accessibility to RH services.
- A convenient booking & consulting process.
- Informative resources on RH services.
- Efficient doctor-patient communication.
Thinking about it long-term, the promotion of reproductive healthcare and providing further access to it could improve the state of reproductive health in the country. This could lead to lower rates of teenage pregnancies, large families, and STI transmission, lessen the stigma when it comes to sex, and encourage the implementation of policies and programs that encourages safe sex, accessible reproductive health services, and sexual health education in the country.
These are the reasons why we believe reproductive health accessibility is highly relevant in our current context and also why our design solution could enable real and empowering change for Filipino women.
To end, working on OBie for UX University 2021 has been a great pleasure. Despite the sleepless nights, countless team meetings, and tears (lol) spent during the duration of this case competition, creating OBie, pushing forward our advocacy of reproductive health, and learning more about the UX research and design process made it all worth it. We are so thankful to User Experience Society and our mentor, Pat Ramos, for the experience!
Nina Co is a Communications Technology Management freshman from the Ateneo de Manila University. She is a beginner UX researcher and designer at the User Experience Society and first runner up at UX University 2021. Aside from UX/UI, Nina is passionate about sexual and reproductive health rights. She is the founder of Amarela, a non-profit for sexual and reproductive healthcare in the Philippines, and also works at Dima Health, an online sexual health pharmacy.
