FEATURES

Recording, Receiving, Recalling, Reflecting, & Retaining

The Main Character

Activity surrounding birth is often focused on the baby, but in Birth Story, the birthing parent is the focus. Thus, the mother's

Recording Moments With Contextual Details

The atoms of a story are moments in time. In Birth Story, users record moments using a simple one-screen flow, with an option to record deeper information about emotions and body feelings.

Let Others Support You

Interview participants indicated that they wouldn't expect to be reliably able to fidget around an app at even the easliest stage of labor. However, they said photos, videos, and other records would be a "gift" to receive after their ordeal. Thus, Birth Story allows loved ones to contribute using a simple share link.

Medical Info Quick-Access

Medical information sometimes needs to be recorded and recalled more quickly than narrative events, so each medical entry gets collected here.

Export to Book or PDF

Apps feel less secure than physical media. Birth Story includes options to export to PDF or order a printed book.

Condensed View of the Full Story

In stories, moments build into longer arcs. A condensed view allows users to see the full picture on one screen. Because full birth stories can span days or even weeks before and after delivery, those moments get their own separate sections in the Full Story timeline.

Epilogue and Reflection Prompt Notifications

Birth Story allows users to layer meaning on top of moments with Reflections, which function similar to a normal text entry.

To reflect on the overarching narrative, Birth Story includes an Epilogue section with prompts, delivered optionally via daily notifications for two weeks after delivery. These focus on the user's connections to the past, the future, and the people in their lives.

RESEARCH & IDEATION

What Are Birth Stories, and How Are They Told?

Building on Formative Research

To find a unique approach to the problem space, we used a combination of interviews, observations of birth vlogs, comparative analysis, and journey mapping. Because my partner and I had little firsthand experience with birth, we needed research to build an understanding of the birth experience.

Research by our professors had already established that birth can be emotionally charged and potentially traumatic. Because it is disorienting, new moms are often fuzzy on the details and struggle to make sense of what happened, even when everything goes normally. Some new parents don't feel listened to or feel handled — they feel a lack of control.

I also gained insight by asking my own mother to recount the story of my birth. She described three key chapters: the days leading up to the birth, the day of the birth, and the aftermath. Some details she remembered clearly, but others were fuzzier. Time, place, people, and feelings were key elements; these became key anchors for our design.

Mapping Birth Stories to Storytelling Structures

We noted that the events surrounding birth roughly matched rising and falling patterns in some common story structures. Anticipation builds, the characters might leave a familiar environment, events reach a climax at birth, and the characters return home, having changed. This structured sequence of events helped us outline a user flow for the use of a mobile application during this experience.

INITIAL UI ITERATIONS

A System for Collecting Moments of Your Story

Primary Concepts: "Moments" and "Full Story"

We found that stories, and births, have individual scenes as well as longer arcs. Thus, our initial wireframes had a chronological feed of moments and a separate place to zoom out. Because the birth experience can be disorienting, we opted for a large, simple "add" button.

Second Round: Implementing Client Feedback

We presented our progress to a representative from UPMC and implemented their feedback, including by adding an onboarding flow, a "Reflect" feature for sensemaking, and other adjustments to the moments and full story screens.

Onboarding Flow

Conciseness was a priority for onboarding; this evolved as we designed, initially including an optional data entry screen to start personalization and the core info entry interaction.

Moments and "Timeline"

We simplified the moments feed but adjusted the moment cards to prioritize time, the key variable in a "moment." To save limited screen space, we shrank the "add" button and placed it lower, for easy thumb access. To simplify the navigation, we freed up nav spave by adding a toggle to swap between feed and zoomed-out views.

Facilitating Reflection

Our wireframes for "Reflect," a new section of the app, featured suggested reflection prompts and common UI patterns for notes or journals on smartphones.

USER INTERVIEWS

What Do New Moms Think?

Testing Plan

We showed our designs to two recent mothers, who graciously volunteered their time and feedback. To prepare, we wrote a set of research goals and a user testing script. This helped guide our conversations.

Research questions included:

• Is this too many onboarding screens?
• What do they expect will happen when I tap the plus (add moment) button?
• If they've reflected on their birth, what format was that done in? Journal, conversations, etc.? Would this format be useful?
• Do moms emotionally resonate with how we've constructed the app experience?

Findings

• The onboarding flow could be simpler, and certain questions like "Is this your first pregnancy?" could be triggering for some moms. We removed these.
• The Add Moments flow made sense.
• People reflect in their own ways. One participant suggested the app reflections might be added into the moments timeline, and another said they'd just use their own journal. In-app reflection needed to be optional and integrated with the other app flows.
• Apps don't last forever, and these participants indicated they wouldn't want to record these kinds of precious moments unless it was, or could be, permanent. Somehow, the birth story needed to make it outside of the app.
• It was not feasible to expect moms to enter anything during any stage of labor, even earlier stages. Thus, it was important to facilitate a close circle of supporters adding moments.

Key Quotes

"I really think this is an app for partners, or support people to do for the mom. And I almost feel like this would be such a good gift to have because you're in such a delirious mode no matter how you give birth."

"I don't even know where my phone is [throughout early labor]."

"I don't know, necessarily, if I would journal in an app...if it's something that I want to keep, because, you know, apps change...I would like to have it in a paper form."

"The whole reason I think I would invest my time into building out this app would be, having a place I could come back to in 5 years, 10 years, 50 years, to either have it printed out, or like, see it."

APPLYING RESEARCH TO UX/UI

An App for Moms & Families

Research-Based UX Change: Integrated Reflection

We realized that "Reflect" needed to be an integrated part of the user experience, not a separate section.

Research-Based Product Change: Support Group

The information within the app belongs to the mom using it — that couldn't change. What users needed was a way for their loved ones to contribute to their stories — to give the "gift" of moments they couldn't capture by themselves. From their Profile page, moms can share a link to give loved ones access to a limited, web-based version of the "add moments" function. This keeps outside contributions relevant and facilitates quick, in-the-moment sharing in potentially frantic situations.

Research-Based Change: Export

There was a clear need for some way to take your Birth Story out of the app. We chose to imagine three ways of doing this: Save Your Files (free), Export to PDF (free), or Export to Book (paid, third-party).

Visual Styles for UI

We crafted a style prioritizing warm colors and rounded shapes to help new moms feel safe and comfortable. We used typography and semantic colors aligned with Myana, the parent app designed by our professors.

REFLECTIONS

Takeaways

Talk to People

We learned far more from actually talking to moms than we did from researching online. Conversations were a key tool — not just for identifying new concepts, but also for validating or prioritizing existing concepts.

We had thought about export and supporter features early on in the process, but we didn't realize how essential they would be until we talked to our target audience. It wasn't just us — other student groups had similar experiences.

Simplify

Looking back, I think I would have approached this project much differently; the real questions here are, "why not use a handwritten journal?", "how can we facilitate reflection and ease boredom during early labor downtime?", "what parts of the birth story are actually unique to the mother?"

A smartphone affords audio recordings (plus transcription), photo/video, linked online media, and connection to others. A one-by-one drip of reflection prompts could solve boredom. The unique parts are the mother's thoughts, feelings, and actions, tied to time and place and people. Media (time-stamped by default on modern devices) shared by others could provide scaffolding for a story. These things, packaged simply, would be sufficient to address the project goals.