Mindful IVF: new onboarding feature and IA revamp for existing meditation app

The right meditation support at the right moment of a woman’s IVF journey.

Team:

  • Me; sole product designer

  • Gordon Mullins; founder and product owner of Mindful IVF

Tools:

  • Figma, Figjam

Deliverables:

  • User research, background research, Figma designs for revamped app info architecture

Duration:

  • Part-time; July-November 2022

Jump to:

📋 Overview

🔍 Research

💡 Ideation


USER PROBLEM

Women doing IVF can’t quickly find the right meditation in the app

  • A friend was struggling during IVF so I suggested meditation

  • Now she’s a super user of the Mindful IVF app, but wants an easier way to find the right meditation to support her

BUSINESS PROBLEM

Mindful IVF is switching from freemium to subscriptions

  • The Dublin-based company (iOS, android) provides meditations helping thousands of women have a happier IVF journey

  • I cold-called the founder to propose UX improvements after exploring the app

  • During my first meeting with Gordon, we discussed business goals:

    📈 Increase retention = new users meditate 10 mins/day, 10 days in a row

    💳 Change pricing model = freemium to subscription

    📲 Increase paid user rate: better new user onboarding, communication of UVP, and conversion rate

    We also discussed hypothesized user goals:

    🧘‍♀️ Understand how regular meditation can reduce infertility stress

    🤳 Quickly find meditations to support their specific stage of the journey

    🚦Access meditations to support them at any point of their journey

    Then Gordon tasked me with creating designs that would address both the user and business goals we discussed.


SOLUTION PREVIEW

To increase retention + drive new subscriptions: clarify the UVP so users fall in love with the product

  • Helps users better understand the business

  • Reduces friction of making new account

  • Gathers data to personalize content

1. New sign up and onboarding

  • Supports the user’s personal IVF treatment

  • Acts as a guide to support the entire IVF journey

2. Personalized meditation program

  • Provides a clear, coherent experience

  • Allows room for Mindful IVF’s content to grow

3. Improved information architecture

Current status: Designs accepted by client and ready for development


The Problem Space

Mindfulness is proven to reduce infertility stress

BACKGROUND

The challenge:

  • In-vitro fertilization (IVF) is a complex fertility treatment with physical, emotional, and financial pain

  • Infertility stress is similar to that of a cancer diagnosis

The opportunity:

  • 10-15% of heterosexual couples in the US do IVF each year, and the number is rising

  • Mindfulness is proven to reduce infertility stress

USER INTERVIEWS

Interviewing users to understand their problems

I talked with 5 women about their IVF experiences. Then they tested the app’s current onboarding flow (seen here).

Current UVP and marketing

Current sign up

Current home

Users expected more personalization based on experience with other femtech apps.

Key insight:

“I would expect something like a period tracking or ovulation app that offers content tailored to where I am in my IVF cycle.” - Interview participant

  • 🤷‍♀️ Users want more guidance from Mindful IVF: 5/5 were excited about the unique content but 4/5 want to understand the benefits and where to start.

    😔 IVF is emotionally taxing: 5/5 feel sadness and isolation and mention the constant unknowns and waiting.

    💆‍♀️ Women doing IVF seek out self care: 5/5 have sought some form of self-care including acupuncture, massage, exercise, or meditation.

Creating a persona to communicate who the solution is for

USER PERSONA

Susannah wants to enhance her fertility treatments and needs quick ways to relax and feel more in control.

Now I better understood Mindful IVF’s users needs. Before translating needs into solutions, I wanted to understand the competition.

Exploring 5 direct and indirect competitors to understand the market

COMPETITIVE RESEARCH

A look at the (long) onboarding funnels for Flo and Expectful.

The competition uses onboarding data to personalize content, but lacks Mindful IVF’s meditations tailored to phases of the IVF journey.

Key insight

  • Although a UX best practice is to delay or skip onboarding to get right to the content, Mindful IVF users will likely tolerate some amount of onboarding to get the benefits of a personal experience.

The Solution Space

Exploring a solution that meets both user and business goals

GOAL SETTING

Solution idea:
New onboarding and information architecture to provide a personal and clear experience.

Users will:
Get excited about customization, understand the UVP, and be more likely to subscribe to the app.

Mindful IVF will:
Evolve more smoothly to subscription model, increase conversions, and scale content successfully.

Creating the structure with a user flow and sketching

USER FLOW + SKETCHING

To start building a structure, I created a user flow to map the paths a first time user starting IVF might take.

Click on image to view larger size

Based on this structure, I sketched designs and added notes to explain each user problem and solution for an upcoming meeting with Gordon.

Gordon was pleased with the proposed solutions as they would improve the user experience, leading to increased conversions. It was time to build my designs.

Building the designs with wireframes

WIREFRAMING

Testing a high fidelity prototype with 5 users to assess my designs and discover problems

USABILITY TESTING

Task 1: Sign up

Task 2: Onboarding

Task 3: Play the first meditation and

Task 4: Find a sleep meditation

Users successfully completed all tasks and found the new designs helpful and intuitive.

Key finding

  • “I like how it asks questions so you get tailored content but you also have the ability to explore.”

  • “Sign up and onboarding was easy and streamlined; it led me right toward the first meditation.”

  • “I like how this is organized, the original design is so linear and everything was just in one long list; I like the 3 tabs at the top here.”

Some usability issues popped up. Given timing constraints, I had to prioritize updates, so I used the following as a guide:

USABILITY TESTING UPDATES

Making three improvements to my design

1. Updated IVF journey selection

  • Users didn’t know what ‘Prep for IVF’ meant; I renamed it ‘New to IVF’

  • Users reported that having miscarriage support after first trimester would be more intuitive so I moved it

2. Improved home screen

  • To improve clarity and encourage exploration, I updated the segment controller labels

  • Some users were unsure how to update IVF, journey so I made language in the hero clickable and added a secondary button at the bottom

3. Revised IA

  • I combined the ‘Anytime’ tracks with ‘All Programs’ and folded them up into cards to reduce confusion and match the app’s IA

Reflection and project status

This project allowed me to improve an app that has a positive impact on many women’s lives. I learned a lot in the process:

1. Don’t assume, talk to users

  • I assumed that listing ‘Experiencing Miscarriage’ directly after ‘First trimester’ in the ‘IVF journey’ screen would be triggering for women doing IVF

  • During testing, users told me it would be more logical and would not be triggering to see it listed in that order

  • Ideally I would have incorporated all the usability testing feedback into my designs, but given my time and resource constraints, I had decided which updates to make

  • By creating a matrix weighing level of effort, priority for the business, and urgency from users, I determined which revisions to make now and which could wait

2. Prioritize revisions

Up next: As of this writing, Gordon is focused on competing priorities, such as closing a fundraising round, but hopes to enter development soon with his engineers. So this new design is not yet in production.

Next
Next

Zinnia