Yona Care
I, alongside with three kickass ladies from frog design, embarked on a passion project to improve the experience of the pelvic exam, a notoriously uncomfortable exam. The tool itself hasn’t been updated in centuries, and was created by a man who tested it on slaves. We knew there were improvements to be made. This project was a product of our nights and weekends and lots of hard, but rewarding work. The final result can be viewed at yonacare.com.
Team
Sahana Kumar - Experience Design
Rachel Hobart - Visual Design
Fran Wang - Mechanical Engineer
Hailey Stewart - Research and Industrial design
Opportunity
Every year, young women go to their gynecologist and get their first pelvic exam. This process is uncomfortable, clinical, and confusing for many, but a very necessary process to protect patients from cervical cancer. We saw an opportunity to improve the experience. For the first phase of this project, myself and my research partner, Hailey Stewart, conducted 17 interviews with patients and gynecologists to understand their painpoints on both sides of the experience.
Research Findings
We conducted in home interviews, as well as office visits with doctors, and developed insights into the current state of the pelvic exam, from the patient and provider side. Here are just a few that inspired us.
We turned those insights into opportunity areas to inspire our concepts.
Radical Empathy
At the end of our first phase of research, we decided to experiment with a research method called Radical Empathy to go beyond just sharing our findings - we wanted people to understand what our participants were going through. We created a script based off our research, and read it aloud to 3 men, while they took notes. Then, they retold the story back to us in their own words. The impact was beyond what we could have imagined.
Concepts
We found in our research that there were many parts of the journey that could be improved with relatively simple adjustments. We wanted to create an ideal journey that was attainable to clinics of varying levels of resources. We also proposed a digital experience, and a physical redesign to the speculum, all wrapped up in a brand we created called Yona.
Individual Concepts
We designed a range of concepts that ranged from physical to digital.
Yona
In order to get the word out, we felt a microsite would be the best way to share our work. We created a brand called Yona and built a site to share our concepts, and ask people for their feedback. View yonacare.com to see it in all its glory.
Press
Yona got a lot of positive reactions, and women from around the world reached out to us to share their appreciation for our work, and to ask when it would be realized! We were interviewed by everyone from Wired to Bustle. The team at frog now continues on a new phase of work to expand the concept to include LGBTQ experiences.
A couple of my favorite articles:
Wired: The Speculum Finally Gets a Modern Redesign
The Lily: Women behind speculum redesign say we need gynecological tools designed by people with vaginas
Note: I am now Yona Alum as of 2017 and could not be prouder of the work that has continued on with the team!