Nuwa

Nuwa is a design project accepted in the CHI 2014 Student Design Competition as Top 12 out of 65 teams.

@ University of Michigan | 2013-2014

OVERVIEW

Nuwa is a design project I worked on with Xinying Li, Lin Pang, Xin Liu, and Yuan Gao. We started from research and ideation until we created prototypes; the project goal is to improve expectant mothers’ self-awareness about their health conditions and help their partners better support them.

This project got accepted in the CHI 2014 Student Design Competition Top 12 out of 65 teams, and we presented it at the CHI 2014 conference in Toronto.

DESIGN PROBLEM

Pregnancy is a complicated and unique process with many bodily changes, discomforts, and sometimes complications. We learned that pregnancy is a couple experience for most people, which involves the cooperation of both expectant parents.

Even though currently there are lots of resources helping the pregnancy process, we found that some problems still exist:

  • Medical interpretation is insufficient
  • Expectant partners need more guidance
  • Expectant mothers desire more emotional support

PROCESS

We conducted 10 contextual interviews and got 131 survey responses. After all the interviews, we arranged an affinity wall to group related data from interviews, find some breakdowns and generate design ideas.

We created 4 personas to identify and prioritize uses’ needs and requirements for our design. We also generated a lot of design ideas and validated them by going through scenarios and storyboards.

We generated wireframes and mid-fi prototypes to present our design ideas, validating our design with potential users, and further utilized their feedback to improve our concept and prototype accordingly.

SOLUTION

We proposed Nuwa, a mobile system consisting of a sensing wristband and a mobile application, which aims to improve expectant mothers’ self-awareness about their health conditions effectively and help their partners better support.

Here are 3 main features of Nuwa:

  • Raising awareness on maternal health conditions with simple data visualization and in-time notifications.
  • Facilitating and guiding partners' support by setting and tracking goals for each other.
  • Granting mothers the information control.

Extended Abstract (PDF)

Poster

Mid-fi Prototype

Affinity wall

Storyboard

Mid-fi prototype

User testing