Inspiration
an at home pap test
Domi Care is an at home pap test. Marketed towards millennial women, Domi Care strives to reduce anxiety around pap tests as well as give women confidence and control over their own health. As the test is taken at home, Domi Care works within the users schedule, eliminating the hassle of creating and going to a doctor’s appointment. Domi Care’s form factor is much like that of a tampon; this familiar shape and function reduce user error as well as making the product more approachable. Via the Domi Care app, users can track test results as well as maintain a more open and continuous doctor/patient dialog.
Domi Care won first place in the 2018 International Housewares Association Student Design Competition. I worked on this project with my partner Anastasia Miller.
Inspired by the Women’s March, we began to look into issues surrounding women’s health. At the start of this project, we gathered both primary and secondary research in the form of open dialog interviews, studying academic articles as well as taking opinion polls.
In major U.S. cities, patients wait an average of 24 days for a specialist appointment.
For cost reasons, 8 of 10 consumers prefer using over the counter (OTC) self-treatments before visiting a healthcare professional.
At one major health network, 52% of its 110 million annual interactions between physicians and patients happen remotely.
The current pap test environment does not promote a comfortable state of being. Statistically a quarter of the population suffers from White Coat Syndrome. WCS is anxiety related to doctor’s office visits, which subsequently can lead to affected test results.
Currently the at home pap test market in the U.S. is limited to only a few competitors, most of which are clinical and inaccessible. We see a product opportunity gap in creating an accessible and consumer friendly at home pap test.
We interviewed panels of potential users to help gain a greater understanding of peoples differing experiences with pap tests as well as narrowing down the areas in the greatest need of improvement.
This chart was created by asking the interviewees to rate their frequency of emotions along the patient journey.
Our product targets millennial women, ages 20 to 35, the demographic most likely to adopt at home healthcare, as well as the recommended age for receiving annual pap tests. We created these three user profiles to represent three important archetypes of our market. We looked at the trend of product influencers on Instagram and their impact on purchase behavior and decided to adopt a similar marketing tactic.
The Activist cares strongly about her own healthcare but also her bodily autonomy, she might not always be insured but she makes an active effort to make sure she is healthy.
The Business Woman is consistently insured but too busy to make appointments and continually cancels any she’s made if something more important comes up, which it always does. She cares about her health but not enough to make time in her schedule.
The Traveler is hardly, if ever insured, and never stays in one place too long. She cares about her health, but without an easier, less expensive solution, getting a pap test is not in her cards.
For our brand attributes we took cues from the cosmetic industry as well as other self care brands in hopes of marketing our product as something that people are excited to buy rather than feeling a sense of dread or as if they have to.
While developing Domi Care we recognized the importance of making an easy to use test to mitigate user error. With this in mind, we created a similar form factor to a tampon, as this is something that most users are familiar with.
Along with developing Domi Care itself, we developed an app that would look to solve many of the anxiety issues surrounding a pap test.
For our preference testing, we presented our user group with three different mechanisms and interaction possibilities. From their feedback we chose the mechanism that best addressed the concerns of the user group.
Domi recognizes that healthcare is changing and so should the means of providing gynecological care. These changes allow for the opportunity to create a more pleasant experience for the users, solving many of the major problems currently wrong with pap tests. Domi users have access to dialogue with their doctor, a stress free and non invasive testing environment and the ability to take the test without interfering with their work/social life.
