The Team
We are a team of interface design students and one medical student led by Prof. Reto Wettach and supported by Prof. Dr. med. Maike Henningsen from the University of Witten-Herdecke.
The Research
During our research we interviewed consultants and doctors working in this field and woman who had an abortion. We created social media accounts, a website www.ungewollt-schwanger.com and a survey to find woman who wanted to talk about their experience. We also wrote and visited consultation agencies and doctors to get a better inside into their work. We learned that during the path to an abortion, patients must consider organizational, emotional, and medical factors at the same time.
Problems during the research
Unfortunately, finding contacts and building trust took a long time because the topic is still taboo in Germany. Thus, an ideation workshop with all shareholders was unfortunately not possible in the given time.
Solutions
After the research we sat down for a 1h workshop within the team to work on the most important questions from our research. This resulted in three approaches: A schedule, a chatbot and a decision coaching.
In the next step, each of the designers elaborated one of the approaches. Based on Asami's sketches, two strong ideas emerged. A project management tool for abortion and a more emotional representation of how much time remains.
We worked each of these approaches into prototypes, which we then sent as a video with a survey to the women in our target audience that we had previously interviewed.
01) 3 Fäden
A time management app that supports pregnancy termination from three aspects: organizational, health, and mental.
02) sandhour
The app visualizes the passage of time and calmly conveys information about the deadlines until abortion and physical changes.
Next Steps
The woman we interviewed gave us useful feedback about the prototypes. The prototypes might likely not become real products. But most of the team will carry on working on this project for the master thesis, doctors thesis and privately.
