An app for helping new mothers navigate feeding their newborns.

 
Role: Product designer, research lead
Company: This January
Client: My Baby, My Commmunity
Project Manager: Jay White
 

Challenge

Breastfeeding is one of the most personal, anxiety-laden, and information-saturated experiences a new mother faces, and the tools available to her are fragmented.

There is a huge gap in the space for an app that brings community, resources, logging, and all the things a mother needs for this journey to one platform. MBMC wanted to change that.

Goal

My Baby, My Community came with a product scoping document and a clear vision: build an app that supports expectant and nursing mothers through pregnancy, early breastfeeding, and the full continuum of their feeding journey.

I worked as their UX and product partner, pressuring-test that vision against real user behavior, and then bringing it to life as an MVP for another funding round.

Research and Findings

This engagement began with primary user research: five in-depth interviews with mothers at various stages of their breastfeeding journey. The result was a full set of research deliverables and a revised wireframe scope grounded in what moms actually need, not what we assumed they needed.

Research Deck
 

User Interviews

I conducted five in-depth user interviews with mothers ranging from 10 weeks to 14 months postpartum. Participants spanned a range of feeding experiences — exclusive breastfeeding, combo feeding, and early weaning — across DC, Philadelphia, and surrounding areas.

research Goals

  • Info seeking: How do new and expectant mothers find breastfeeding information and support

  • Pain Points: What are the unmet needs, moments of anxiety, and recurring frustrations across the breastfeeding journey?

  • Openness to tools: What is moms' openness to AI assistance, professional directories, community features, and app-based tracking?

Competitors

I quickly realized that our competition wasn’t another app, it was the combination of all other resources that mothers are looking at. I outlined the other tools that mothers use that may overlap with some of our features. As we design, the goal will be to consolidate everything they need into a single source: our app.

Findings

The research surfaced consistent patterns across all participants, regardless of feeding approach, geography, or support network. These insights became the foundation for every deliverable that followed.

“At 2 am I'm either googling frantically or figuring it out on my own instincts. Chatting with something that actually knew about breastfeeding at that hour — and wouldn't judge me — would be extremely useful.”

— Mia, 12 months postpartum

User Journeys

 

Persona

The research surfaced a clear primary persona: Leandra. Maya represents the shared needs, fears, and motivations of the moms MBMC is built for and a composite of patterns consistent across all five interviews

 

User Journeys

There are five distinct and important user journeys that we can build the platform with in mind. 
In the design phase, we will build out the two journeys that will be most frequently used.

  1. First Time opening the app Onboarding and first impression

  2. Tracking a feeding session The core utility group

  3. Joining a community group Finding belonging

  4. Finding and connecting with an LC Professional support

  5. The 2 am panic moment Crisis support via AI

Features and Architecture

 

Features

I validated each feature the client asked for. descoped two that were not relevant based on the research

 

Information Architecture

We categorized these features into the following architecture, highlighting each feature area as its own navigational category. Link to see larger

Wireframes

These wires serve as an MVP for our clients to pursue another round of funding.

Next steps include:

  • Cultivating the brand look and feel and applying it to our product

  • Validating our design decisions via user testing before moving into our next round of feature updates.