Arsenic
Partner
Dartmouth Children's Environmental Health & Disease Prevention Research Center
Role
Product Designer
Duration
3 months
Tools
Illustrator, Dreamweaver
CONTEXT
We partnered with the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center researchers to create a digital resource that educates expectant mothers about the danger of arsenic exposure. Arsenic exposure during pregnancy can lead to a number of issues for the infant, such as low birth weight or possible developmental difficulties.
THE GOAL
Some of our key goals include:
Easily digestible: we aimed to showcase our solution in a way that resonates with expectant mothers. Despite having heavy scientific research and information, we wanted to make sure that key messages were easily understandable and delivered in a way that is receptive.
Empowering: we wanted our target audience to feel empowered to make change and take preventative measures rather than feel vulnerable and intimidated.
Ideation & brainstorming
A major challenge was finding the right balance between scientific accuracy and digestible communication for our target audience. When working with our partners, they heavily stressed attention to research and facts - the original content from our partners came in the form of dense and detailed medical reports. A critical piece of our design was translating the dense research and knowledge into something that resonates and can be easily consumed by mothers.
We brainstormed a number of potential solutions, including websites, apps, interactive games, etc. Eventually, we settled on a parallax website which explains how arsenic gets into our food and water because it was able to 1) drive engagement and interaction, 2) tell a story cohesively, and 3) be informative yet quick so parents are incentivized to scroll through full content.
Initial sketches
We worked with our partners to refine the scenes before going into high-fidelity mock-ups and development to make sure we’re delivering the right key messages. The team spent substantial time sketching out the various scenes which reflect the key messages.
The ultimate goal was to show how arsenic travels in the environment and how it gets into your food and water. We wanted to educate people on where arsenic comes from, then give them tips on how to reduce arsenic exposure.
High-fidelity designs
High-fidelity background scenes, as well as animation icons, were created in Adobe Illustrator. See below for some snapshots of the scenes! The arsenic particles will travel throughout the scenes, with additional text boxes that pop up to provide detailed information.
Reflections
This project felt a bit different, as we were ultimately designing a solution for our partners and collaborating as thought partners in the process. We had a lot of back and forth’s that pushed us to explain the rationales behind our design process and solutions, in addition to taking into account partner and user needs.
Tailoring delivery for the appropriate audience
Our central goal was to educate expecting or recent mothers about the dangers of arsenic exposure, while leaving them feeling empowered. Mothers have a lot on their minds already and can be inundated with information. Because of this, we were very intentional in our solution (e.g., medium, aesthetic, effort) - we wanted something that would be fun and approachable but still explain the implications of arsenic exposure in an engaging way.
Effectively collaborating with our partners
We needed to find a balance between keeping scientific accuracy and ability to resonate with users - this caused our partners to be worried about watering down the content too much. We focused on stakeholder alignment and making sure we explained our design process and reasoning in order to get our partners on board, as well as reviewing the critical pieces of content to ensure quality.
Emphasizing importance of brainstorming and ideation
When the team first started the project, we thought that the solution (e.g., informative website, interactive game) would be fairly straightforward. We jumped right into these solutions, before realizing that they didn’t fit our specific needs (e.g., evoked intimidation and vulnerability in our target audience, did not have access to necessary data). After taking a step back and taking more time in our design thinking process, we settled on our parallax site showing a story.