April 2020 – July 2021
UX/UI Design, Prototyping & Usability Testing
Adobe XD, Miro, Illustrator, Rotato & Final Cut Pro X
Aril IVF is a comprehensive digital companion designed to support women throughout their in vitro fertilization journey. The app combines practical treatment management tools with emotional support features and personalized guidance to address the complex needs of IVF patients.
Women undergoing IVF face numerous challenges: complex medication schedules, frequent appointments, physical discomfort, emotional strain, and overwhelming information management. Existing fertility apps typically focus on natural conception tracking or offer fragmented IVF support without addressing the holistic nature of the experience.
Aril addresses the fragmented experience of IVF treatment by providing a unified platform that serves as both a medical tracking tool and emotional support system. The app's core strength lies in its holistic approach—integrating detailed treatment protocol tracking, medication management, and appointment scheduling with a rich content repository of educational resources and community support features.
What sets Aril apart is the human element: each user is paired with a dedicated care guide who provides personalized support throughout their journey, offering expert guidance, emotional reassurance, and practical assistance when needed. The app's intuitive interface simplifies complex medical protocols while maintaining the precision required for successful treatment outcomes.
Even as I was writing this,. felt a bit awkward as there are a lot of instances where the word ‘Sex’ or ‘Periods’ or ‘IVF’ occurs 😄. My notion is that this outlook is predominantly due to societal judgement & pressure.
In the Pre-modern era, Indians had a lot of kids. When I say ‘a lot’, I really mean it! An average Indian couple may have raised anywhere between 5 - 12 kids. And if someone was not capable of having kids, the judgemental eyes of our society lock on to them. They felt embarrassed and ashamed about their body & infertility, as if they’re to blame for their infertility.
But since the dawn of modern medicine and fertility treatments (such as IVF, IUI, etc) becoming more successful, the fear of not being able to conceive is gone for the most part but the social stigma still persists. Women’s lives have been dictated by a lot of things, and unfortunately so is our care.
Misinformation and myths, inaccurate delayed diagnosis, poor decision-making and a lack of access to global standards of care — A series of obstacles women face while receiving care!
We aim to drive out this stigma through holistic care focused on ‘Women’s Health’. We want to empower women with awareness, knowledge, tools, resources and some of the best experts in India. We want to remind women that ‘It’s okay to be you!’. 👍🏻👍🏼👍🏽👍🏾👍🏿
In-depth interviews:
Spoke with 12 women at different stages of their IVF journey
Expert consultations:
Interviewed 4 fertility specialists and 3 reproductive health counselors
Competitive analysis:
Evaluated 8 existing fertility and health tracking apps
Dairy Studies:
6 participants documented their daily IVF experiences for 3 weeks
Online community analysis:
Reviewed discussions in IVF support forums to identify common themes
Have to rely on the nurse to help them keep track of their journey, mostly through traditional paper-based methods
It is hard to find the right & precise information about women’s health issues
Lack of support groups to give them emotional support
Women undergoing IVF
Women yet to start the IVF treatment
Women using Aril for other purposes such as trackers, content, meds tracking etc.
Before designing Aril, I needed to understand what was already available to women undergoing IVF. I conducted a thorough competitive analysis of eight existing apps in the fertility space to identify gaps, pain points, and opportunities.
Fertility Friend - Focuses primarily on natural conception tracking
Glow - General fertility app with limited IVF-specific features
Kindara - Symptom tracking with community featuresOvia - Pregnancy and fertility tracking
Clue - Period and fertility tracking
Fertility IQ - Education-focused platform
Medisafe - General medication management
Strenghts:
• Robust cycle and symptom tracking (Glow, Kindara)
• Clean data visualization (Clue)
• Strong educational content (Fertility IQ)
• Reliable medication reminders (Medisafe)
• Active community forums (Glow)
Critical Gaps:
• No single app offered comprehensive IVF protocol tracking
• Medication management wasn't tailored to complex IVF regimens
• Educational content wasn't personalized to treatment stage
• Community features lacked privacy controls for sensitive topics
• No human support component existed in any app
• Emotional wellbeing features were minimal or absent
• Limited integration with clinical care
Opportunity Areas:
• Human guidance element (completely missing in the market)
• Holistic approach connecting physical tracking with emotional support
• Treatment-stage specific resources and community matching
• Partner inclusion features
• Privacy-first community design
This resulted in numerous brainstorming sessions (between me and Aastha), feedback sessions with the team and sometimes a few heated arguments too haha.
I had to design an onboarding experience that had a low cognitive load as well as draw in the essential data from the user, needed to kick start their app experience. This was crucial as this is their first contact with our app and a bad first impression can result in unhappy users, thereby affecting our brand’s success.
Initially, we had the idea of skipping the onboarding as the onboarding and as far as the data was concerned, it could be collected as users keep using the app. But later realized that, except for our content repository, we needed initial data to run other stuff like the treatment plan, tools, trackers, etc.
Having a quick onboarding, collecting just the essential data and showing their progress at each step, reducing the time to a mere 30-40 seconds to complete.
We also included the option to ‘Continue as a guest’ too (at login), as we didn’t want login to be a hurdle to start using the app. We also thought of making the login as a ‘Pop-up’ as it subconsciously tells them that “this step is not going to take long” and this possibly be the last step.
This was one of the more challenging problems to solve. Manually adding meds is a definite no-no as users don’t have the time to repeat the same process again and again.
The other option was to automate the whole process using AI. For e.g., they could upload their prescription which our AI understands and adds it to their treatment plan. Or if we have a partnership with a clinic, we could take that data and update their profile. But both these options were not feasible as they were dependent.
To make this more intuitive, we made this a 2-step process where the first step is to select the meds and second is to add their respective custom details. This eliminated the need to repeat the process for all meds and also made it easy in case of any data corrections.
One of our main challenges was how to make our features easily accessible & deliver the most value.
This was quite the headscratcher. My AHA moment was when I came across the recent photo of astronauts and their control system built by SpaceX. They had all their controls within their hand’s reach.
This insight-based approach gave the necessary information at a glance.
Furthermore, we enhanced this idea by keeping it customizable where users can drag each card to exactly where they want.
Now, having figured out one piece of the puzzle, the other challenge was ‘how to show their treatment plan effectively?’ as the primary reason they use our app is for their IVF procedure.
The treatment plan is crucial for IVF patients as it shows their current treatment progress, medications they need to take, scheduled appointments, etc. Showing this clearly without overloading the user was a challenge!
At first, we put these using a tab system. It didn’t work as only one thing was visible at a time. We then tried putting it like an accordion. That was not user-friendly either.
It worked!
7/8 users were able to keep track of the treatment plan.
To solve this, we initially tried a horizontal (scrollable) calendar at the top of the page. But quickly realized that’s not effective.
Then we tried to remove the calendar and put quick links to take them to the plan. Though this technically met its purpose, it didn’t create the impact we imagined it would.
This made the calendar a part of the page but also didn’t compete with other elements, like it would say, “I’ll mind my own business sitting here” 😄.
This calendar highlights every phase in their journey and also has icons for the same. Users can add anything to their plan either by clicking on any of the dates (if they’re being specific) or click on the huge purple ‘+’ button.
There’s also a dedicated card about the ‘Treatment Plan’ on the dash showing the current phase and day of their treatment.
The treatment plan is crucial for IVF patients as it shows their current treatment progress, medications they need to take, scheduled appointments, etc. Showing this clearly without overloading the user was a challenge!
This tool was the hardest to nail. The tool by itself was simple but the hard part was making it interactive. Similar to other aspects of the design, this also involved a myriad of iterations.
This tool’s concept was simple too. Enter a few key data and our algorithms run in the background to give the suggested treatment to undergo and its respective success rates.
This type of form filling makes the user feel like it’s a conversation and reduces cognitive load.
The contraceptive tool does what it says — It helps you compare between various contraceptives and recommends the most suited for you.
Here, more than design, data is king! We needed was to present it in a way that’s easy to follow & compare.
The PCOS management tool is a short questionnaire which once answered will give insights about your PCOS management.
Since the questionnaire was designed with questions in the order of face to legs, an animation is shown to give better context.
Reports are an essential part of healthcare & we needed to be something more than just a table of values on a clinic letterhead.
We started out by deconstructing the existing boring report. We then asked ourselves, “What extra value do we want to give users apart from the obvious test results?”. The immediate answer was to explain to them what the numbers really mean and their next steps.
For e.g., some may need to maintain a certain fluid intake per day, some may need to keep their weight in check, etc).
Our tracker list was fairly generic and consisted of the following 5 trackers — Ovulation, Fluid, Sleep Weight and Step tracker.
To make life simpler, we also included the option to connect Google Fit and Apple Health.
I was mainly responsible for Aril’s design language (a.k.a Branding) and going into it I already had a few ideas in mind.
‘Why the name Aril’ and ‘What’s with the pomegranate?’
While it's often used in works of great artists to depict the beauty of the vagina (IKR, Preach 🙌), it specifically is meant to represent the ovary and ova cells.
Throughout literature, it’s mentioned as a metaphor for women to explore their sexuality. Oh oh and also, it’s a natural aphrodisiac + helps you stay YOUNG! (Score!) 🌚
I wanted to use this rich history behind this amazing fruit and do it justice. And obviously, like any other designer, it took a few trials and errors to do just that!
And in order to make Aril playful and colourful, we had an array of secondary colours to accompany each aspect of the app.
For e.g., Blue was chosen for the Care Team and so the next time users see the colour blue, they know it’s something related to our Care Team. Colour psychology!
And in order to make Aril playful and colourful, we had an array of secondary colours to accompany each aspect of the app.
For e.g., Blue was chosen for the Care Team and so the next time users see the colour blue, they know it’s something related to our Care Team. Colour psychology!
As a designer and a curious human, I need validation. Conducting user testing for the app was a no brainer.
Unfortunately due to the pandemic, we had to do this over Zoom calls.
Virtual usability testing was definitely one of the more challenging experiences in this project 😀. We gave them access to our prototype and went through the entire testing process with their Screen Share ON.
Though the 2-step medication process was simple, users were not able to find out how to add custom meds
In the treatment plan, they were finding it hard to notice the horizontal scroll for the IVF Phases
They loved the idea of the dash, where everything they need was in one scroll with the option to customize the tiles (cards)
They absolutely loved the idea of having a calendar showing their upcoming events at the top (on Dash)
All the participants said if they had this app when they were undergoing IVF, they’d definitely give it a shot!
All in all, our design worked!! (for the most part at least 😀)
But there were a few things that we improved in our next version such as a better user flow to add and edit medications, an easier way to change their ‘goals’, improved versions of all the tools, etc
This is how I’d sum up my experience working on this amazing project 😍.
A team of young, talented minds coming together to create a paradigm shift in women’s health, to turn tables and to dare to be different!
Every day was different. Every day was unique. This whole journey was a myriad of experiences, teaching me lessons not just pertaining to design but also a significant amount of life lessons too! More importantly, I learned how NOT to do stuff 😄.
