Minor Project: Soft Embrace

26 Apr 2024 - 1 Aug 2024 ( Week 1 - Week 15 )

Edwin Choo Quan Rong 0348305

Bachelor of Design (Hons) In Creative Media

Minor Project: Soft Embrace

---

Instructions

---

Task 1: Project Proposal

The project in this module involves the development of a comprehensive brand identity design with collaboration with existing companies or Impact Lab projects in Taylor's University. After browsing through the options given, we formed a group of 7 individuals with various specializations in the Breast Pump project belonging to Taylor's Impact Labs collaborator from the Digital Health and Medical Advancement. 

My group members and their specializations consists of:

• Lee Jayden (Group Leader, UI/UX)
• Hasnol Rafiq (UI/UX)
• Edwin Choo Quan Rong (UI/UX)
• Jennifer Huang (Digital Animation)
• Hassan Moossajee (Digital Animation)
• Felicia Aurelia Kosasih (Entertainment Design)
• Benjamin Ng Chii Wen (Entertainment Design)

Week 1: Contextual Research

To begin this project, we as a group delve into contextual research around the breast pump through gathering information from online resources to have a solid understanding of the product itself. After collaborative discussion, our group identified a few key points to research on, this includes:

• Research on existing breast pump projects / prototype projects
• User experience of moms on breast pumps
• Comparative analysis of leading breast pump brands
• Basic information regarding breast pump types, usage, and FAQs
• Developing interview questions for user research
• Breast pump design references

As a UI/UX designer, I was assigned to conduct research on the user experience of moms on breast pumps, comparing the pros and cons between breast pumping and breastfeeding, as well as including information of breast pump types and choices made by mothers to analyze what user experience benefits that led mothers to chose specific products and features. This research helps with putting us in the shoes of the mothers, giving us a better understanding of what they experience during their breast pumping journey.

Fig 1.1 - User Experience of Moms on Breast Pumps (Contextual Research)

Week 2 & 3: Customer Journey Map

Moving on from the contextual research, we split the tasks amongst our members to fill up the project proposal criteria in a timely manner. The tasks includes:

• Development of interview questions for user research
• Completing Customer Journey Map
• Sketching initial breast pump design ideas
• Preparing google slides content for presentation

I was assigned along with Rafiq to develop the Customer Journey Map, displaying the mom's experience of buying breast pumps and diving into concepts including the actions of moms in each stage of their customer journey, identifying touchpoints and their needs and pains, as well as customer feelings.

Fig 2.1 - Customer Journey Map

By identifying the pains and needs of moms during their customer journey experience, the information obtained helped in contributing to our user research interview questions which Jennifer and Felicia is in charge of developing simultaneously.

Meanwhile, Ben has developed a few sketch ideas based on our previous contextual research and group discussions, as well as the required criteria given by our Impact Labs collaborator that our breast pump project can be directed towards. Here are the initial sketches of the breast pump features:

Fig 2.2 - Portable UV Breast Pods (Idea #1)

Fig 2.3 - Heat Therapy with compact UV Charger (Idea #2)

Fig 2.4 - Portable Magnetic Resonance Breast Pump (Idea #3)

After discussion between Mr. Mike (lecturer), Ms Natasha (advisor), and our group members, we decided to proceed mostly with Idea #1 while incorporating some elements from Idea #2 into our breast pump, focusing on the main features requested by the Impact Labs collaborator which consists of UV Sterilization, Tubeless design, and Hands-free usability.

Week 4 & 5: Miro deliverables & assisting Interview Questions

In week 4 & 5, I continued working with Rafiq on the project proposal criteria of our problem statement and "how might we...?" questions to improve our understanding of the underlying issues that moms face with breast pumping, focusing on a human-centered design approach. 

After discussing with Mr. Mike, he advised us that the problem statement is to be written only when the other criteria of user research, user personas, user journey maps, and empathy maps are completed. Thus, we leave the current problem statement and "how might we...?" questions as drafts for now, despite that, it does help us in gaining some insights to aid with the later tasks.

During this week, the UI/UX team also aided with the development of the interview questions, refining the questions obtain greater results from the participants. Jennifer and Felicia were in charge of gathering interviewee participants for our questionnaire since week 2, which are then interviewed from week 4 - 5. Soon after, the data is transcribed and reviewed by both teams. 

I was in charge of arranging the transcribed data into a spreadsheet to better visualize and compare the data gathered amongst the interviewees. Additionally, a summary is provided to present key words and points from each question answered by all interviewees to identify common needs and pain points. This data will be used to aid with the development of user personas, user journey maps, user stories, and empathy maps.

Fig 3.1 - Interviewee Data Spreadsheet

Week 6 & 7: UI/UX Deliverables

The completion of the interview and data acquisition allows the UI/UX team to start the development of the UX deliverables in the project proposal criteria:

• User Personas
• User Journey Maps
• User Stories
• Empathy Maps

We begun discussing and developing the user personas using the interviewee data spreadsheet as a reference point to incorporate realistic pains and needs into the user persona. A total of 3 user personas are developed with their common factors stemming from the context of a Malaysian citizen.

Fig 4.1 - User Persona #1

Fig 4.2 - User Persona #2

Fig 4.3 - User Persona #3

The user personas created provides context regarding the wants, needs, frustrations, goals, personalities, and willingness to pay between each user persona. It aims to provide differences and common factors between the mothers, as well as describing their unique situations and experience with breast pumping. A comparison can be made between the user personas to ensure the end product of our breast pump addresses the key needs and pain points of breast pumping mothers.

Week 8: Proposal Presentation

This is the presentation week to showcase our product's idea proposal towards the Impact Lab Collaborators.  Attached below is our project proposal presentation slides:

Fig 5.1 - Soft Embrace Proposal Presentation Slides

---

Task 2: Developing low-fidelity prototypes & completing criteria for final presentation

Week 9 - 11: Developing Breast Pump app design & low-fidelity breast pump

Breast pump app prototype

The UI/UX team is tasked with designing an accompanying app of the breast pump. Thus, I worked with Rafiq to develop this app interface together.

Fig 6.1 - Overview of Figma Wireframes

The app associated with the breast pump was requested initially as an accompanying feature to aid with controls, data records, and playing music for example. Despite the app not being necessary to fulfill the main requirements of the project, our team decided to push the implementation of the app as it helps to address the underlying insights and pain points that mothers experience from our analysis of the data provided from the project proposal. The user can connect the breast pump with the app via Bluetooth, where the Soft Embrace symbol on the top of the breast pump illuminates to signify its connected.

However, the breast pump is not completely tied to the app in terms of usage, the breast pump is still fully operational without the app, while using it with the app will help improve the experience of its users with the features provided. This provides 2 options for users to choose whether to use with the app or without it, considering users who either have no time to use the app, not tech-savvy, or disinterested in learning the app. 

Control Menu

Fig 6.2 - Control Menu (Landing Page)

This page greets the user once they open the app, providing the main control features of the breast pump. The control menu of the app provides various features for the users to:

• Switch on/off the breast pump
• Adjust pressure settings precisely
• Data Tracking feature to record milk amount pumped per day
• Alarm feature to set reminders and time window for breast pumping

Firstly. the user lands on the main screen where they can switch on/off the breast pump as well as adjusting the pressure to their liking. The pressure adjustment feature was added on both the breast pump itself and the app with the former having 3 pressure settings of Low, Medium, High, setting the pressure to a specific value on the pressure slider bar in the app. While the app itself provides users the option to adjust the pressure to a specific value, allowing mothers to find the correct pressure amount for breast pumping. This pressure feature is added to address the pain point from our user research, where breast pumping mothers have to choose between experiencing pain from high pressure in exchange for time efficiency, or taking longer to breast pump with lower pressure in exchange for a more comfortable experience. This feature aims to reduce both contrasting points of breast pumping by giving mothers the option to find suitable pressure levels for an optimum breast pumping experience, focusing on both comfort and time efficiency.

Additionally, the data tracking feature is provided for mothers to take note of the amount of milk produced per session, showing data of amount of milk produced on specific time of day, the total milk amount produced per day, as well as a monthly average of milk produced. This information is provided for the users to identify at which time of the day produces the most amount of milk, so that consistent pumping schedules can be planned for the same timeslots for most milk production. Users can also use the data to identify anomalies in their milk produced for the past week, which they can show a specialist in case of any milk producing disorders.

Furthermore, a simple alarm and timer feature is added in the app to act as reminders to the users for whenever they need to breast pump.

Community Tab

Fig 6.3 - Community Tab

The community tab provides users a variety of support resources that serves to improve the breast pumping journey. These features includes:

• Milk Donor Channel (for mothers to request or donate milk supply)
  
• Babysitter Services (volunteering service for moms to request or offer babysitting needs)
• Mobile lactation consultants (get expert help from lactation consultants online)

Additionally, the lower section of the menu belongs to a community tab which provides mothers a community network to communicate with like-minded individuals. These communities includes:

• Mother's Circle (an all-topic chat circle for mums on the platform)
  
  
• Breast Pumping Advice (channel for mothers to ask advice related to breast pumping)
  
  
• Parenting Tips & Tricks (for parents to exchange knowledge regarding parenting)
  
  
• Supply Exchange (requesting or donating breast pumping supplies outside of milk such as flanges, milk bottles, nipple balms, etc)
  
  
• Experts Q&A (get in touch with various experts in the field of breast pumping)
  
  
• Health and Wellness (for mothers to share knowledge about improving better overall health)
  
  

Fig 6.4 - Milk Donor Channel example

Fig 6.5 - Mother's Circle example

Resource Links Menu

Fig 6.6 - Links Menu

The links menu serves as a trustworthy information hub for users to search for information without questioning the validity of the source as the information presented is from verified breast pumping specialists/centers. This menu is included to combat an underlying insight from our user research, where mothers have a hesitancy to trust public resources as there are many surface-level articles saying multiple different things regarding breast pumping matters.

Users can scroll through the page and view the list of websites presented with a summarized text description of what the website presents. The underlined title text is a clickable link towards the webpage should the users want to explore in further detail.

Settings Menu

Fig 6.7 - Settings Menu

This is a basic settings menu which provides users the ability to adjust their preferences to their needs. A notable difference compared to general settings menus after apps is the Notifications tab, which provides notification reminders for next pumping session, milk storage reminders, and pump cleaning reminders.

Fig 6.8 - Notifications Menu Closeup

Viewable Figma File

Fig 6.9 - Viewable Figma File

View the figma prototype via the link here.

Low-fidelity breast pump

During the same timeframe of week 9 - week 11, we started development on our low-fidelity breast pump. Fortunately, we managed to obtain free breast pump models to dismantle and analyze from one of our interviewees, which we started dismantling to identify the components of a breast pump, understanding how it works on the inside, and gathering its measurements for us to create realistic sized breast pump designs later on.

Fig 7.0 - Measurements of Breast Pump Parts

After measuring the components of the breast pump, Ben drew an initial sketch for the breast pump design, while Hassan designed a 3D model of the breast pump for us to 3D print it in the future.

Fig 7.1 - Initial Breast Pump Design (Outer)

Fig 7.2 - Initial Breast Pump Design (Inner)

Fig 7.3 - Initial 3D Model of Breast Pump

The pump's features consists of an on/off button on the upper hole, with the 3 lower holes being adjustments in pressure. The pump is also split into 2 compartments, with the upper half being the pump itself while the lower half signified by the purple colored model is the milk container of the pump. A flange can be inserted directly behind the breast pump to then attach to the user's breast, eliminating the need of a tubed design.

Week 12 - 14: Finalizing breast pump prototype

After obtaining the 3D model, I utilized my 3D printing knowledge to advise Hassan with fine tuning the 3D model to be suitable for 3D printing. When the 3D printed models arrived, we met up to finalize the design of the breast pump. Attached below is a compilation of us completing the breast pump prototype model:

Fig 7.4 - Breast Pump Low-Fidelity Prototype Assembly

The prototype breast pump now has improvements from the previous design, changing the pump's controls to a simple plus and minus button to adjust the pressure, for a total of 5 levels. A huge Bluetooth logo is placed on the top to signify the connection to the app, which will be changed to the design of our logo brand: Soft Embrace. 

The large container on the left of the image is the UV Charger container. The idea is derived from the air pods, where it is scaled up to accommodate for the breast pumps to be placed inside the UV charger as "breast pods". 

---

Task 3: Final Presentation to Impact Lab Collaborators

Week 15: Final Presentation

After compiling all the work our groupmates have done over the weeks, a final presentation slide is prepared for presentation towards the Impact Lab Collaborators of the Breast Pump project. Attached below is our final presentation slides:

Fig 8.1 - Soft Embrace Final Presentation Slides