Black Mamas Community Collective Goes Paperless
Non-profit BMCC’s home visiting program is designed to ease black moms’ transition into motherhood while providing mental health support.
Our 7-person team redesigned the survey measuring the program’s impact to go paperless, cutting processing time by 3 weeks and expanding their capacity to help more moms.
With real-time data, you can react faster and tell your story to further your reach.
Role: Service designer, Researcher, Prototyper, and User tester
For: AIGA Changemakers & Black Mamas Community Collective
Type: User research, Survey design, Competitive Analysis, Stakeholder management
Timeline: 3 months
The Challenge
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.
Results
By going paperless, we enabled BMCC to reap the following benefits:
Cut survey processing down by 3 weeks, increasing their capacity to reach more moms
Adjust care real-time through identifying moms experiencing postpartum depression and anxiety
Administer the survey consistently through actionable alerts for Doulas
Share the story of their impact real-time to win over funders
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
Stakeholder Interviews to narrow focus
“Our participants aren’t just data points. We want them to experience the program’s benefits in their day-to-day lives.”
We started out the project not knowing what our focus would be. How we got there:
4 themes surfaced in our stakeholder interviews. BMCC voted to improve actionable data.
9 stakeholder interviews to learn about BMCC’s biggest problems
4 key problems identified & presented
Voting via a digital poll by BMCC to choose the problem focus and ensure alignment
Making data actionable became our focus.
User Interviews
“It wasn’t until after I was diagnosed and taking meds that my doula found out that I had postpartum depression.”
We (including myself) conducted 5 interviews with moms, the recipients of the surveys, and doulas, providers of childcare and labor support, who administered the survey.
Insights:
Survey results were shared to doulas months after-the-fact, prohibiting real-time interventions
Surveys were administered differently depending on a doula’s area of focus, leaving them to focus on survey results that fell under their expertise only
Moms weren’t given context on the surveys and the importance of their continued participation in the program
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 that surfaced in our interviews:
Provide real-time survey results, eliminating the need for manual survey scoring
Bake-in actionable alerts for doulas to adjust care if survey results indicate a mom is in distress
Provide moms context consistently on how survey results are used and contribute to BMCC’s mission
Prototyping & Refining
While BMCC deliberated over the survey platform, I created a low-fidelity prototype to help stakeholders visualize the new digital survey logic and get excited about the solution.
I dropped in the 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 makes it so much easier now that I don’t have to worry about carting around paper surveys everywhere.”
Once the survey was architected in Qualtrics by Jose and myself, we tested it with a combination of 6 Doulas, moms, and BMCC admins.
We tested for clarity, ease of use, and understanding of survey context compared to the former paper survey.
What we learned:
Moms and doulas loved the new descriptive introductions to each survey, 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