Maternal and Child Health

VERSA worked closely with the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) to deliver a mobile application for new parents.

Backed by hundreds of scientific resources, the Maternal Child Health (MCH) was to be designed to support parents as they navigate the early stages of raising a child.

Strategy

Blueprinting

Design

Development

See it in action

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At a Glance

Working with over 100 families to deliver a mobile application centred around a virtual nurse. Surpassing 200,000 total downloads, the MCH app addressed specific challenges faced by new parents by providing them with trusted resources and instant support.

Extensive user research
UX design and validation
Conversational design

Answers to over 400 questions via chat
Access to 2000 trusted resources
Over 200,000 total downloads

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The challenge

Designing an experience for time-poor parents.

With a wealth of knowledge to share, the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services and the Maternal Child Health service wanted to improve their engagement with parents across the state, helping them find trusted and reliable information.

The design challenge was that parents today are incredibly time poor, often juggling family, work, and social commitments. Between 'Dr. Google', independent parenting blogs, podcasts, and un-cited resources, there has never been more parenting advice readily available online— some of it confusing and contradictory.

How do we connect busy parents with trusted advice, curated to their child's development?

The solution

A virtual MCH nurse in your pocket.

Our research suggested that parents prefer to find information online using task-focused searches such as “When should my child start walking?”. They are also chronically time poor, and find tailored information delivered through short form content to be far more useful than detailed advice.

To complement the intuitive interface and bite-sized resources, trusted content was also to be delivered through a virtual MCH nurse. This important feature allowed parents to receive instant responses to their questions via a conversational interface, addressing the information seeking patterns identified throughout our research.

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Detailed research

30 hours of user interviews with a diverse range of parents
Consulting with over 100 families through UX design phases
Longitudinal studies to target incremental improvements

Targeted features

A profile-creation experience to curate resources and track milestones
A virtual nurse with natural language processing (NLU/NLP) capability
Sleep and settling update with step-by-step guides and new features

By seeking to understand the unmet needs of new parents, our experience team was able to deliver targeted features and incremental improvements across the end-to-end user experience.

The Results

An essential part of the new parent experience.

The finished application was received with great enthusiasm by parents and the MCH community alike. Post-launch reports showed 50,000 downloads in the first 12 months, and an average of 3,400 monthly chatbot interactions.

Since then, we have continued work with the MCH team (and the next wave of new parents) to expand the features of the app, evolving the experience to meet changing needs. This has led to the addition of a child growth and immunisation tracker, content in 8 different languages, sleep tracking features, and so much more!

We are also proud to report that the experience has been downloaded by more than 200,000 people, with no sign of slowing down.

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"This app is easy to navigate and packed with useful resources, like the Green Book with extra info."

Happy user, MCH Mobile App

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