Project Overview

BirdHouse is an application developed during my final capstone course at the University of Waterloo, guided by Sunlife Financial for the graduating class of Global Business & Digital Arts.

Problem Space 💭

There’s this unspoken expectation for women to work like they don’t have children, and raise children as if they don’t work. This blurred boundary between work and parental responsibility has been an ongoing issue that has negatively impacted mothers and places stress on their mental health.

Our target audience are these working mothers, aged 25-45, experiencing stress-induced anxiety. These stressors are often associated with the challenges of child care. Along with the expectations in fulfilling their maternal roles, while working a job that they either want or really need for financial stability.

71 percent of moms surveyed reported losing more than two hours from the work/school day due to taking their child for a doctor visit, underscoring the critical need and importance of more convenient access to healthcare. (Business Wire, 2016)

Challenges

Research 📖

Rooted in Facts

To actually make a difference for women and guardians experiencing generalized anxiety disorder, as designers we must first gain a thorough understanding of the condition first. Because of this, our research scope was quite expansive. Our research aimed to gain an understanding of not only the disorder itself, but as well as the average workday a mother experiences, technological feasibility, income streams, and future potential for the growth of the platform.

Access to Electronic Medical Records

Currently, there are a myriad of issues that persist within the Canadian medical industry due to paper medical records. Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) allow patient data to be more readily available and legible to patients and healthcare professionals.

EMRs allow healthcare professionals to more easily follow up with patients, and make better decisions due to the availability of up-to-date, comprehensive patient information.

Ultimately, Electronic Medical Records are expected to reduce costs and improve quality of care.

(Retrieved from https://www.assembly.pe.ca / 2024)

Personas

We created various personas to help guide our design thinking by envisioning the needs and wants that our potential users would experience.

Persona #1

Although our platform focuses on how our product can help the average working class mother, we must take all different needs into account. To ensure our application could actually be helpful to families, we first must ensure that people within families, other than just mothers or caretakers would actually use it.

Persona #2

User Journey Map

By leveraging the insights we gained from created personas of our target audience(s) we can use this data to create a user journey map. This is method is used to identify the opportunities and behaviours of our target users.

Branding & Visual Design ✨

Once our low fidelity was created and revised, we needed to prepare for the high fidelity interface design. Which meant the need for the development of a visual brand identity and polished graphics to bring Birdhouse to life. The first foundational step we needed to execute was the creation of a style guide.

Colour Pallette

Primary

Secondary

System Standard Colours

The colour palette consists of a primary teal colour which leans into an earthy tone, contrasted by delicate secondary colours ranging from variations of pink. purples, and yellows.

Logo

Iconography

Typography

Components