Designers
Hyejeong Son, Seohyun Kang, Ujeong Ko, Youngsun Roh
Year
2024
Category
New Talent
Country
Korea, Republic
School
Sookmyung Women's University
Teacher
Yeunji Kim
»"Flowe: Enjoy a healthy menopausal life" addresses the specific needs of menopausal women by combining emotional and practical support through community, information and communication features. This femtech app focuses on topics such as body awareness, self-care and self-determination, enabling older women to engage with their bodies and discuss their condition more openly. The jury was impressed by the user-centered design and research, and a purposeful integration of AI-powered support features.«
Kathrin Eichhorn and Tae-Young Kang
And the Award goes to...
Three questions for the project team
What was the particular challenge of the project from a UX point of view?
Menopause, which affects all 40-50 year old women, is a time of sudden hormonal changes that brings about a variety of physical and mental changes. However, menopausal women are often unaware that they are going through menopause, so they either don't find out about it from people around them, or if they do, they don't know what to do with it and neglect themselves. To get through menopause, we focused on getting through it with the people around you. We encourage menopausal women to stay active and emotionally connected by doing daily challenges with friends and family, exchanging letters, and more. Ultimately, Flowe helps menopausal women "get it" regarding themselves and "get through it" in a healthy way, so that they can enter a second stage of life.
What was your personal highlight in the development process? Was there an aha!-moment, was there a low point?
We knew that the symptoms that women experience during menopause are not only physical, but also mental, so we added a feature that allows users to write in a diary and the AI analyzes the words to identify symptoms of depression. By interviewing menopausal women and their families, we realized that menopause is something that everyone in the family has to deal with, so we created group missions to help them overcome menopause together. After designing the wireframes, we conducted usability tests with menopausal women. The insights we gained from the usability tests were that women could not see the relatively small font and that they needed to communicate together. We increased the font size and introduced a new community feature.
Where do you see yourself and the project in the next five years?
The famtech market is growing because of increased interest in the health of women who were previously indifferent about their health. According to Femtech Industry Landscape Q2 2022, the current market size is $25.3 billion and is expected to grow by more than 16% annually until 2030. From this market trend, Flowe, a service for menopausal women, can receive lots of benefits. In addition, since it is a service that deals with the health of middle-aged women, collaboration with pharmaceutical companies/hospitals/femtech companies is essential. By having a partnership with the companies concerned, we want to study and analyze women's bodies more and solve women's problems from various UX perspectives.
