Veera - Shuruthi's Portfolio

Category: App design

Team count: 2

Year: 2023

Roles: Analysis, Ideation, UI

Duration: 6 months

Polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) is a common condition that affects hormones in women. It causes irregular menstrual periods, excess hair growth, acne and infertility. Treatment for PCOS depends on if you wish to become pregnant. People with PCOS may be at higher risk for certain health conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure.

Veera aims to create more awareness about women’s physical and mental needs and create an impact in the Fem-tech industry. It is a Y Combinator start up and the world's largest online PCOS specialized clinic with a revolutionary ecosystem. As mentioned in an article by ET, with the global FemTech market estimated to cross 97 billion dollars by 2030 at a CAGR of over 16% and half of the world population being women, the majority of the brands still focus on puberty and pregnancy-related health issues. There is a tremendous lack of support for the overall healthcare of women and challenges like PCOS, menopause, etc.

We engaged with Veera to design new features and improve existing ones according to results drawn by their internal research team, shared by product managers. The structure of the project involved quick discussions according to product requirement documents after which design updates were launched feature by feature.

Research

Veera started as a chat-based healthcare service for women, with the intention to provide judgement-free sexual, reproductive and mental healthcare in one place. However, on conducting research it became apparent that the service had to solve for the following key pain points.

Isolation: PCOS is an isolating process when people around you don’t understand it’s extremities. It can feel lonely and frustrating to go through the side effects without being able to express the full extent of them or right communicate the care you need to feel better.

Lack of accountability: Since women undergo treatment alone, they don’t feel accountable and if there’s a lack of discipline - they struggle to stay consistent.

Lack of visibility of results: Managing PCOS with all the right habits yields no visible results in the short term - which is demotivating and causes lack of consistency in following the treatment plans.

Misconceptions: There are lot of false believes and fake treatment plans in the market which help people develop misconceptions about the disorder and the treatment pathways.

Self-image: Due to the visible physical side effects like weight gain, acne, hair loss, etc. women face a hard time with body image issues.

Ideation

The platform’s main goals were to help users get a clear understanding of their patterns, progress, ups & downs, medical results, etc. The existing version assigns a care manager for each user. Also graphs and progress charts on the platform help user keep a track of their health and be fully aware of every step. Additionally the company also helps the user with medical processes like testing, consulting, etc. from high-profile professionals found directly on the platform. The following features were finalized keeping in mind the same:

Chat with a personal manager: Every user has their own care manager. This professional gets a daily update of the user’s logged in details and is able to provide advice on the same, and get on consultation calls when required. This feature would cut down on isolation and help maintain consistency in following lifestyle habits.

Daily, weekly, and monthly progress analysis: All data logged in by the user, from water intake, food, weight and waist measures shall reflect on their progress board, giving them a clear view of their improvements and weak areas.

Reminders according to preferred timings: To help maintain consistency, there are reminders that can be customized according to user’s preferred timings.

Increasing participation: To help build trust and reliability, transformation stories of existing users are shared on their dashboards. Quick and easy feedback forms given time to time helps understand how we could improve the experience.

Design

After discussions with the research team, we finalized flows and drew out ideas for different screens and layouts on paper, followed by the UI of the same.

Breaking myths: The website and the app are designed in way that help users educate themselves regarding women health from shared stories and content, build a community, all this while taking care of themselves. Features like log daily progress, transformation stories, blogs, symptoms, etc. on both platforms create more awareness around the ‘Why’ and the ‘Future outcomes’ of their actions and help in making wise and healthy decisions.

Personalization: The intensive intake form is designed to understand the most intricate details about the user’s mental and physical health and includes questions regarding their medical history, period cycle, diet and fitness and so much more.

Comfort via interface: The app is designed in such a way that it feels personal to the user. The purple and pink colours used, invoke a sense of belonging contrary to the general practice of using white which might sometimes feel formal and technical. Furthermore, the language used is conversational, i.e., it uses words used by the users to describe or talk about PCOS, making it relatable and humane.

Key takeaways

This was a fun slow paced long -duration project that I personally really enjoyed, because I used to hear back from Veera on the features I worked on, once they receive user feedback. Some features like the meal reminders worked out really well, while some required a revision. I learnt and enjoyed UI in this project too!