The holistic approach of the menstrual cycle with Flow— Case study

How having a holistic approach to the menstrual cycle can help women take control over their period.

7 min readMar 11, 2021

For this project, Ironhack Paris asked us to work on a call for projects for the Wellness institute. We worked on this project for 8 days, in March 2021. I was working as a UX/UI Designer with Julie, also a UX/UI Designer.

The topic we worked on turned out to be even more exciting than we thought. I really fell in love with the problem we wanted to address and was convinced by its importance. Throughout all the stages of the design process, we saw a lot of user needs that kept on coming back and through iterations it was really satisfying to see our final prototype answering these needs. The final prototype is Flow, a mobile application that helps users Surf their cycle.

It enables people with menstruation to understand their cycle with information, personalized tips, and reminders to help them track their cycle. The end goal is to help them to take advantage of the different phases of the menstrual cycle to “hack” their cycle.

🧘‍♀️ The initial brief : building a mobile application on wellness

The initial brief is coming from the wellness institute. Their goal is to help people live a healthier life. They want to achieve it by leveraging technology with a new mobile app designed to support wellness. They made the observation that despite the vast availability of personal metrics and health apps people continue to struggle with their wellness.

When we had the possibility to choose which topic we wanted to tackle, we first asked ourselves why with so many apps destined for mental health people continue to struggle ? And we found the answer in the holistic approach.

Often, when people want to get healthy they rely on their body (by doing diet, exercise, etc).

But wellness does not rely only on facts and data, people need to understand and reconnect to their body and mind. That’s why we chose an holistic approach to the problem. Holistic believes that both the physical and mental aspects of life are closely connected and factor into the overall health and wellness of a person. This is a key factor is the wellness process.

“Health is a state of body. Wellness is a state of being.” J.Stanford

This quote summarizes perfectly the importance of holistic approach. Wellness lies in the whole being, and that is what the holistic approach conveys.

We chose to tackle the holistic approach of menstrual cycle. We felt that this was a really important topic, but not enough talked about or researched about today. Although it concerns half of the world population.

🔍 Secondary Research

The first step to empathize with the user was the secondary research. This step turned out to be a key step in the solution we were going to build.
We learned a lot of valuable information :

Importance of understanding the menstrual cycle. Most people know of the biological rhythm of the menstrual cycle. But they often ignore the energetic rhythm which is equally important for the daily life of persons who have menstruation. Indeed, as hormones are changing, the level of energy is changing as well. The problem is today that they are not formed by society to manage this, or they are given a contraceptive pill blocking this wave of hormones.
Surfing the cycle : this holistic approach of the menstrual cycle lies on the fact that instead of going against their cycle, persons with menstruation could learn how to surf these waves of hormones to get empowered by their menstrual cycle. Indeed, these waves of hormones will happen 500 times in a life, so it is crucial to learn how to take advantage of it.
Interpret the menstrual cycle : learning the characteristics and signals of each phase will allow persons with menstruation to take control over their menstrual cycle.

📊 Gathering quantitative data

We thought for this topic it was important to have quantitative data to give us a good overview of the current situation, the main pain points and habits of the users.

We had over 200 answers, mainly from people on holistic Facebook groups.

Here are the most interesting key results from this survey :

💬 Job to be done interviews

To truly understand our users and what are their needs, we conducted job to be done interviews with four different users.

We had a lot of common insights from the users :

“I don’t want that adapting to my flow will slow me down in my daily life. I pretend as if everything was normal”
“I have trouble making connections between what I live/feel and my cycle.”
“I would like to have information on my cycle, understand and know what I can do at my own scale.”
“I think that the cycle has an impact on our energy : knowing it can help to get organized and tone down.”

Basically the users have a strong will to reconnect to their body and cycle, but don’t know how to do it and would like to have really concrete information and tips to do so.

❔ How might we ?

After connecting on so many levels with our user, we arrive to the problem definition, that we achieved with the “How Might We” method.

We defined 3 How might we. These are questions related to the problems we felt were the most important to solve.

How might we allow users to interpret and understand better their feelings according to their current phase of cycle?
How might we give information to users in order for them to take control of their menstrual cycle?
How might we make users want to follow their cycle on the long run ?

🛴 Building our MVP

After an ideation with Crazy 8 and Worst Ideas, we did a feature prioritization brainstorming to select our MVP features. In order to select those feature, we focused on the 3 How might we that we defined and the knowledge we gained from the research phase.

Our MVP ended up with the following features :

Input data — user can add data to follow the cycle in the app (energy, flow, mood)
Visualization of the phase cycle the user is in
Information on the cycle — through a stories format, the user will see explanation on the phase of the cycle, advice to live the best this phase (what to do, natural tips, etc)
Onboarding — explain the holistic approach of the menstrual cycle and the different phases
Onboarding — questions to personalize the experience
Push Notification — notification to remind to input data

🔨 Mid-fi prototyping and testing

Once we had the features we wanted to develop in mind, we created our user flow to have the right architecture information.
Then we started to draw quickly lo-fi to align on what we wanted, before moving on to creating our mid-fi.

After creating our mid-fi, we did usability testing with 3 different users

We were able to improve our mid-fi and iterate thanks to their feedbacks

✅ What the users liked :

Homepage well-structured
Visualization of the different phases
Page with all the tips
Clear onboarding information

❌ What we needed to improve :

Onboarding stories: possibility to skip and pause
Unify stories and shorter ones
Buttons on navigation bar unclear
Ask for notifications later in the journey

✨ Our UI Process

To kick off our UI design process we agreed on design principles, aiming to guide us throughout the UI journey.

Human: Flow is all about people
Simple: we want to provide the simplest way to achieve our users goals
Powerful: we want to use simplicity to make powerful things

We did a brainstorming session to come up with our brand attributes, which will guide us to make the UI decisions for our hi-fi prototypes and help us create the look and feel of our app.

Sorority: we target users who, every month, have the same thing happening to their body.
Honesty: our goal is to be honest, transparent, and to allow women to be honest with their body too.
Trust: women need to trust us but above all trust themselves.