1. Social Impact Takes Time & Grit
3-step framework to get started practicing UX and making social
impact
2. Natalie Mandriko
● Runs discoveries for big and small
companies
● Coaches agile teams to incorporate design
processes
● Mentors startups on UX
Co-Founder of motherhood.design. Product manager mommyhelper.co
3. Sofya Savkina
● Self-driven user research
practitioner
● Background in Marketing and
Design
● 1st member of
Motherhood.Design
UX research consultant, design thinker
4. Step 1 - Identify a Problem
Start by answering 3 questions:
● What problem?
● For whom?
● Why?
Find your own problem worth solving to make social impact
…..are you solving
5. Step 2 - Build Your Community
External - engage early evangelists and validate the problem with them
6. Step 2 - Build Your Community
Internal - build the team around unified vision
7. Step 3 - Transition to Lean Startup
● Co-design with community
● Test with users
● Validate with thought leaders
Apply Design Thinking
8. Step 3 - Transition to Lean Startup
● Refine your idea
● Test prototype on the
market
● Rinse and repeat
Practice Lean Startup
9. Get Invited to Motherhood.Design AMA
Learn practical insights
● Last Saturday of month
● UX Research and Design;
● Lean UX and Lean Startup;
● Social Impact.
https://www.motherhood.design/
3 min
Natalie:
How many of us want to practice UX more? (show of hands)
I also wanted to practice more UX, specifically, Lean UX.
and I added "UX" to my title myself.
2 years ago I have decided that I needed to take an action to deepen my UX practice and what's now a nonprofit organization motherhood.design was born.
My name is Natalie Mandriko, I am a co-founder of Motherhood.design - a nonprofit organization that designs innovative solutions to keep moms healthy and happy.
and as any organization - a company cannot live without people who support the mission.
Let me introduce the member #1 of motherhood.design - Sofya Savkina - Head of UX Research. She was my support system, when I have just started this long journey to social impact.
Sofya:
Hi, I am Sofya Savkina, a self-taught user researcher and design thinker
I am very excited to be here.
How many of you have UX in their job title? - see show of hands
To help answer this question, I want to tell you how I got where I am right now.
About 4 years ago, working as a marketing associate in a small IT company, I got curious about how would it feel to work as part of an IT project team?
I started researching how to become a part of the IT team without knowing how to code.
I started taking various classes, courses, and workshops ranging from BA crash-course to Design thinking to Human centered design
While this pursuit of knowledge was stretched in time, [balancing between a full-time marketing job and a full-time mothering job only left a few hours a week to myself] - I was determined.
I realized early that User experience design is a very practical field and in order to succeed, I need to put all that I learned into practice. If you don’t use it - you lose it.
That's when Natalie reached out to me with her idea. I was eager to solidify the knowledge received in the classroom - so becoming a part of this new endeavor was a dream come true.
Transion: Now we are going to share with you 3 steps on how to get started practicing UX and making social impact.
I know some of you will have questions - and we love questions. We reserved time at the end to answer as many as we can.
Sofya: 5 min
Ok great! I am in - now what?
The first step for us was to identify a problem that would be worth solving.
PPD is a #1 complication of childbirth in the US
but - it's a very stigmatized issue, and we understood that women wouldn't just openly speak up, and won't open up to two complete strangers.
So, we set out to do a secondary research: watching you-tube videos that postpartum moms posted. We wanted to find out new moms' pain points and challenges, what their emotions were.
Later, we found a few moms that we interviewed 1:1 to deepen our knowledge
As a result of this research, we identified a problem to solve - One of the contributing factors of the PPD - Lack of support - that's what we were trying to solve
For whom - first-time pregnant moms
Why did we want to solve this problem? - because it was close to home.
we both were moms for a few years already, and we remembered how hard the first few weeks with the newborn were.
So what can YOU do right now to start? - Find your own problem that you want to solve to make social impact.
And be ready to solve it for free for sometime.
Natalie: 5 min, 2 slides
Once you know what problem you want to work on as a designer to practice design, to really learn what it takes to design experiences, it's time to build a community to sustain the design effort.
With the community you have higher chances to succeed in social impact venture.
What kind of community am I talking about?
First, think of Lean Startup and what it preaches. It preaches that you need to know what problem and who whom are you solving? In the early stage of the startup - your first supporters are called - earlyevangelists. Steve Blank coined the term “Earlyvangelists” — the people who are the most motivated to solve their problems.
So, when I talk about building the community, first, I mean - the community of earlyevangelists - who are painfully aware of the problem that you want to solve. These people are your promoters, these people are your the first customers down the road.
We have partnered up with one of the Johns Hopkins hospitals innovation hub to organize the session where the medical staff, as well as outside hospitals people — maternal advocates and moms — would come to ideate together to solve the pre-defined design challenge - HMW design better transition into motherhood?
I had few objectives in mind when I have decided to organize brainstorming sessions
Get more earlyevangelists so I can test prototypes with them;
User recruitment is hard. I have realized that I needed to re-fill a pool of potential users on a regular basis, so I can run a continuous loop of testing. We think ahead of the game, we need to think about testing of the prototype to be developed later in the design thinking process.
Get noticed by medical institutions to form a potential partnership;
Get more diverse ideas straight from the community
So, as you can tell, we have engaged the community early in the design thinking phase (buy-in) , so they can contribute their solutions, so we - an internal team - can pick the most promising and test them.
This earlyevangelists' engagement validated the problem that we want to solve, as well as it clarified the message that resonate with them. So we can instantly connect with them through the copy when we talk to them not in person, but digitally.
Natalie:
Not only the customer development helped us to build first promoters, but also it built an internal understanding that we are onto something, so it build an internal team mission, which is outmost crucial to sustain the effort.
So the second type of community I am talking about - this is your internal - design community that is driven by the mission you are collectively set out for yourselves.
4 min - Design thinking (Sofya):
After the ideation sessions with Sibley Innovation hub, we gathered all the ideas into a spreadsheet.
we chose top 3 ideas from over 20 ideas.
We voted and selected one to prototype.
The next question we had was - how are we going to prototype this idea? - Open IDEO was running a very practical rapid prototyping course that we chose to take as a team. During this 4-week course, we as a team produced a paper prototype that we could put out in front of users to test.
This course was very important for a few reasons:
1) We took our research to the next level - got a prototype and tested with users.
2) How do you engage early evangelists? Get them to take a course and co-design with you. This is exactly what happened in MD - one of participants of the Sibley brainstorming workshops joined our team and took part in the prototyping course
3) Team grew from 3 to 5 people: with different skillsets: marketing (Olay), maternal Healthcare SME
4) team members added design thinking skills and contributed professional skills - beauty of co-designing with early evangelists
two communities got interlaced
Next?
We were craving validation. So, we submitted our idea to the OpenIDEO Challenge:
"How might we reimagine the new life experience by addressing the diverse challenges of all mothers, babies and those who care for them?"
and we won! Out of 150+ applicants, we got into a short list of 30 under a new category "wildcards", ultimately our concept was selected as Top 5 winning projects. We flew to San Francisco to attend a specialized workshop for top 5 winning ideas.
Thought leader in maternal mental health
Validation with the thought leaders gave us confidence
4 min - Lean Statup:
After flying to SF, our internal team was confident that we can design for social impact. and the next challenge is to make the impact.
After those rounds of validation we started preparing for a Lean Startup grind.
So, this when we have started transitioning from DT into Lean Startup - refining idea into a workable prototype and testing it on the market.
Last September we participated in the TechStars Startup Weekend in DC.
We recruited the largest team during the first evening of the event, and then led it through 72 chaotic hours of defining, refining and creating a new variation of the prototype. As a result, out of 10 finalists and over 200 participants, MommyHelper earned a 2nd place at DC TechStars Startup Weekend.
We continued testing the concept and saw two trends: while
MommyHelper failed to gain traction with first-time pregnant moms, there is a great interest from maternal service providers to be part of the platform.
Small businesses are signing up to get early access to the platform that solves the number one pain of small businesses - streamlined marketing.
Now, we went through the design sprint to adjust the prototype, soft-launched MVP last week.
Our design community team is running the next design sprint in parallel with MVP testing.
We provide educational UX workshops to community of designers and companies.
We offer monthly AMA to our supporters.
Want to learn more about what we do and how?
Join our monthly AMA (ASK ME ANYTHING ) (last Sat of the month) .
This is an exclusive offer for our supporters.
Go to motherhood.design to support us and learn practical application from us about:
UX Research and Design ;
Lean UX and Lean Startup;
Social Impact.