Through its website and app for iOS and Android, pregnancy and parenting brand What to Expect offers information and support for every step of the parenting journey.
What to Expect
Overview
The project
While refreshing its visual identity, What to Expect wanted to improve the user interface design and user experience across its digital products—an editorial website, iOS and Android apps, community forum, and email newsletter.
The team
What to Expect hired me as a freelance Product Designer to work alongside a Design Director, Product Director, User Researcher, Editorial team, and Engineering team.
My role
Site map, user journey maps, wireframes, UI/visual design, interactive prototypes, usability tests, visual identity, graphics/illustration
A new visual identity
When I joined the team at What to Expect, they were in the process of refreshing the visual brand. We re-designed many of the digital products with this new design language, including the iOS app below, while improving the overall user experience.
Launching two significant UX improvements
Search
With an improved search functionality for both the website and iOS/Android apps, users can more easily search for specific articles, groups, and discussions with filters. More on this project below.
iOS articles
Users can read articles natively within the iOS app. Previously app users had to read articles within a webview in the app, causing slow load times and difficulty navigating the articles experience.
Improving discovery of community groups
The What to Expect community forum is an environment where parents can connect and share with others going through similar experiences through message boards, discussion threads, and other user-generated features.
The opportunity
We saw an opportunity to increase engagement in the community forum by improving the discovery of groups.
Groups are spaces where users can join and discuss a specific topic. For example, popular groups included “Fertility Treatments” and “Baby Names.”
The problem
When we conducted user research, we saw that users expectations of where to search for groups did not align with the existing experience.
Users could only search for groups within the Community page on the website or Community tab within the mobile app. However, users wanted to search for groups in the Search tab in the main navigation.
Therefore, the primary path to find groups was hidden. This problem existed on both the website and app.
The solution
We created a new Search experience by surfacing all results in the main search functionality, including community groups and discussions. Tabs allow the ability to filter results by Top Stories, Topics, or Groups.
By better aligning with expectations of search, users could more easily discover groups related to topics that they were searching for. These user needs applied to both the app and the website.
iOS Search
Website search
Re-designing Community homepage on the web
The community section of the website was outdated, and there was a clear opportunity to elevate the user experience and visual design. We also wanted to improve how members follow and discover discussions by user testing three concepts.
To validate design thinking, I wireframed three concepts that we user tested to understand which features most resonated with new and existing members.
After talking to users, we decided to move forward with Variant C, which separated their saved Groups and Bookmarks into tabs. In addition, a tab for an Explore feed encouraged discovery of new and related content based on their interests.
Variant A:
Modules
Variant B:
Modules + feed
Variant C:
Navigation tabs
Graphics and illustration
I also created iconography and graphics as part of the new visual identity.
To capture the playfulness of the brand, we developed an icon style of fruit imagery that we used to reference the size of a growing baby during pregnancy.
