Real-Time Support for Moms at BMCC
Mental health surveys were administered on paper,
which took time and labor to process.
With real-time data, you can react faster and tell your story to further your reach.
By going paperless, we enabled BMCC to:
Cut survey processing down by 3 weeks
Adjust Mom’s depression & anxiety care real-time
Share their up-to-date impact to win over funders
The Challenge
How might we turn postpartum screening data into timely insights for care teams?
Before, surveys to measure the impact of BMCC’s home visiting program on moms’ mental health were paper-based.
Care interventions couldn’t be administered real-time because surveys would get lost and take weeks to be processed.
For: Pro-bono project organized by AIGA Changemakers + Black Mamas Community Collective, a UT-backed non-profit
Type: User research, Survey design, Competitive Analysis, Stakeholder management
Timeline: 6 months
Role:
Service designer, researching and designed throughout the project
Collaborating with a team of 7, including project manager, copywriter, and visual + UX designers
Results
Journey mapping, Before & After
We cut the time it took to analyze survey results in half, enabling BMCC to intervene for moms in distress in real-time.
Defining the problem
"Our participants aren’t just data points. We want them to feel the benefits in their day-to-day."
BMCC voted to improve actionable data among key themes from interviews
Stakeholder Interviews to narrow focus
Our mission was broad: improving maternal outcomes.
How we prioritized key issues at BMCC:
9 stakeholder interviews to learn about BMCC’s biggest problems
4 key problems surfaced
Voting via a digital poll by BMCC to choose the problem focus and ensure alignment
Making data actionable became our focus.
User Interviews: Too Little, Too Late
"It wasn’t until after I was diagnosed that my doula found out I had postpartum."
We (including myself) conducted 6 interviews with:
Moms - survey recipients
Doulas - survey administrators and providers of childcare + labor support
Insights:
Survey results were only shared months afterwards
This prevented real-time intervention for moms in crisis.Results were interpreted differently based on expertise
Doulas tended to act on survey results under their area of focus only.Moms weren’t given context the surveys
This led to increased turnover and poorer health outcomes.
Competitive analysis
Team member Christine led the competitive analysis of survey platforms.
We proposed moving the survey to a digital platform, which would alleviate pain points from our interviews:
Provide real-time survey results, eliminating the need for manual scoring
Bake-in actionable alerts for doulas to adjust care if survey results show distress
Provide moms context consistently on how survey results are used and contribute to BMCC’s mission
Prototyping & Refining
I created a low-fidelity prototype to help stakeholders visualize the digital platform in practice.
I included new survey language refined by our copywriter, Meg, to make the clinical surveys more conversational and clear:
Description for Anxiety survey, Before:
Below is a list of phrases that describe certain feelings that people have.Please indicate how often you experience these feelings by marking an X in the box that best fits.
Description for Anxiety survey, After:
Anxious feelings aren’t always easy to spot, or name, especially while pregnant or after having a new baby. Some amount of worry and fear is normal. Sometimes, our bodies take on emotions in unexpected ways.
Below is a list of phrases that describe specific feelings that people have. Please share with us how often you experience each kind of feeling by choosing the answer that best fits.
BMCC landed on Qualtrics based on their familiarity with the platform and its HIPAA compliance.
User Testing
"This is great—now I can check one place to see how mom is doing."
I user tested the digital survey with a combination of 6 Doulas, moms, and BMCC admins.
The goal: gauge clarity, ease of use, and understanding of survey context compared to the paper survey.
What we learned:
Moms and doulas found the new survey descriptions helpful, which kept the big picture in mind
BMCC admins were happy they didn’t have to grade survey responses individually, but they’re still getting used to Qualtrics
Doulas wanted more control over automated alerts
Key Takeaways
Context is motivating. Now, moms understood:
The bigger picture of how survey results helps other moms like them
Negative emotions were normal and expected, so they could answer survey questions honestly
Make your solution adaptable to account for different education and technology literacy levels in users
Make data actionable, enabling BMCC make a bigger impact in moms’ lives and win over funders