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Conceptualizing a Wellness App, Look After, for New Mothers Who Often Face Overlooked Mental Health Challenges After Childbirth. This case study focuses on designing an app to support mothers’ mental recovery through scientific guidance, mood tracking, a calming interface, and a supportive community.
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I conceptualized the concept with the team and led the user testing and development from beginning to end.
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Approximately 12% to 16% of women experience postpartum depression. These are probably conservative estimates, as cases of maternal depression are underreported or underdiagnosed. Once a child is born, the well-being of the mother is overlooked.
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To create an app for new mothers focusing on mentally recovering after pregnancy and giving birth.
Discover
We explored postpartum depression (PPD) to understand factors influencing perinatal health. Key takeaways:
Mobile use is high among perinatal women:
A 2016 study (Osma et al.) surveyed 509 pregnant/postpartum women and found:90% searched for health-related info online
72% downloaded apps
Mobile phones were the most used device (47.5%)
Nutritional deficiencies are linked to PPD:
During pregnancy and postpartum recovery (especially after cesarean births), women have higher nutrient needs. Poor nutrition can increase the risk of PPD and slow physical healing.
These findings helped us understand both the digital behavior and physical/emotional needs of our users.
User Survey
We surveyed new mothers about their journey from pregnancy to motherhood to gain a better understanding of their emotional and mental well-being.
Key insights:
Emotional disconnect: While many mothers expressed happiness about their baby, some shared that they were not happy with themselves, feeling emotionally drained, isolated, and alone.
Self-worth struggles: Several women admitted they didn’t love themselves or struggled to understand their own emotions.
Need for connection: Many expressed a desire for group support and tools to help them make sense of their feelings.
Strong interest in support tools:
85.7% said they would be interested in using a postpartum app to help them navigate this phase.
These insights highlighted a gap in emotional support for new mothers, informing our design decisions moving forward.
User Interviews
We conducted interviews with five mothers, ages 28–39, to explore their emotional and mental well-being postpartum.
Key Findings:
Most mothers felt uninformed about postpartum depression (PPD) and unprepared for its symptoms.
They experienced a lack of personal check-ins, and the focus was often on the baby, not the mother.
Common feelings included:
Isolation
Sadness and fatigue
Overwhelm, shame, and guilt
Pain Points:
“I felt like something was wrong with me.”
Discomfort and dissociation from their new body
A deep sense of unknown sadness
Persistent feelings of failure or inadequacy
These interviews revealed a critical gap in maternal support and emotional validation, further reinforcing the need for an empathetic, supportive postpartum solution.
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Persona
Margaux is a young mother who is absolutely in love with her newborn son. But since giving birth, she feels like she’s no longer herself. She feels lost, disconnected from her body, and emotionally overwhelmed, yet doesn’t know how to ask for help or whether what she’s feeling is even normal.
Margaux represents countless women silently experiencing postpartum depression (PPD), without access to emotional support or trustworthy tools.
The Problem
There is a significant lack of accessible, trustworthy support for postpartum depression (PPD). Many mothers are unaware of what they’re experiencing, and when they seek help, particularly through app stores, they’re often met with low-quality, paywalled apps that fail to offer meaningful support.
As a result, mothers are left to navigate PPD alone during one of the most physically and emotionally vulnerable times of their lives.
Our Emotional Journey Map revealed an overwhelmingly negative experience:
Feelings of sadness, guilt, isolation, and inadequacy often go unaddressed
The support system frequently focuses solely on the baby, not the mother
This reveals a pressing need for evidence-based, empathetic solutions designed to support mothers holistically: emotionally, mentally, and physically.
Ideating
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Solution
By creating an app dedicated to postpartum depression (PPD) information and resources, we aim to raise awareness and provide practical coping strategies for this prevalent yet often hidden condition.
The app will be tailored specifically to new mothers, addressing their unique emotional and physical needs during this transformative period, offering support that feels empathetic, accessible, and trustworthy.
Lo-Fi
For Look After, we created lo-fi wireframes, basic, simple layouts that focus on where key elements like buttons and text go, without any colors or detailed visuals. These wireframes helped us quickly test the app’s structure and user flow, so we could make improvements early before adding design polish
In addition to the UX strategy, I also developed a calming, supportive visual system for LookAfter. The style tile, UI components, and high-fidelity screens were designed to reflect the app’s empathetic tone and make users feel safe and understood.
Mid-Fi
Mid-fi wireframes added more detail to the basic layouts by showing better structure, spacing, and content placement, though still without final colors or images. This helped us get a clearer idea of how the app would look and feel, making it easier to gather feedback on usability and flow before moving on to high-fidelity designs.
Validate
Prototype
User Testing
To validate the Look After app concept, we ran a small user test with 10 participants, all new or expecting mothers.
What Worked
80% completion rate (8 out of 10 users)
Most users completed the study, which informed us that the app felt intuitive and engaging overall.Average time: 2 mins 33 seconds
This matched our goal for a short, focused test just enough to gather insights without overwhelming users.Engaged users stayed longer
Those who completed the test typically spent 3 to 5 minutes, showing they were invested once they got started.
Conclusion
This project started with the belief that there’s a real need for products that support the well-being of people who have given birth. Through personal experience, secondary research, and user interviews and surveys, we validated that need. LOOK AFTER is designed to fill this gap by offering helpful resources, emotional support, and a space to connect with others going through similar experiences. The app raises awareness of postpartum depression (PPD), provides self-care tools, and helps users feel less alone during a difficult and often overlooked time.