Products
During the decade I spent at The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy (now Power to Decide), I had the opportunity to work on the development and maintenance of a number of digital products that were part of the Bedsider and Bedsider Providers programs. I also worked with partner organizations to help them build original tools or to create custom adaptations of our products.
Across all of the tools featured here, my role was primarily that of a product manager. I gathered requirements, wrote user stories, prioritized features, and tested the builds. I also generated user flows, wrote and edited copy, gave feedback on design, conducted user testing, and advocated for our end users.
Decision-Support Tools
In partnership with University of California San Francisco (UCSF)—using their algorithm and Bedsider’s style—we built My Birth Control, a tablet-based decision-support tool to facilitate quality contraceptive decision making, with the ultimate goal of helping women to select the best method for them.
I worked closely with the UCSF team to generate copy for each of the screens, striving to balance economy and understanding, all the while maintaining Bedsider’s tone. I then collaborated with our designer and developers to build and test the application.
I also worked on two adaptations of My Birth Control. One version was for women being seen in the VA healthcare system. I was responsible for editing the content after veterans indicated a strong preference for a more serious and direct tone than was used in the original tool. For the other adaptation, which incorporated HIV prevention into the application, I advised on the content and cognitive testing plan.
In support of young women adhering to their chosen birth control regimens and showing up for their clinic appointments, we created reminders as one of the initial features of Bedsider. For the first few years of our program, reminders were delivered via text message or email (young adults overwhelming choosing the former), eventually to be replaced by a reminders app.
A defining feature of the birth control reminders is that they changed every, single day, with the intention of entertaining and engaging the recipient while nudging them to stick with their pill, patch, ring, or shot schedule. That required close collaboration with a copywriter to ensure that we had pithy, on-tone content loaded for daily delivery.
As we began to work with clinicians through Bedsider Providers, we heard that they wanted a way to sign up their patients for reminders. After observing them use the wizard-based, step-by-step reminders flow on the consumer site, it was clear they needed a more streamlined process for quickly setting up reminders in their busy clinics.
To meet their needs, we offered them a private portal with a more data-entry like interface where they could set up customized appointment reminders, STI retest reminders, HPV vaccine reminders, and reminders for birth control methods and refills. I managed the build of the portal and offered technical documentation and assistance to our users.
Clinic Finder
To help young people find a clinic where they could access birth control and other sexual health services, we built a clinic finder into Bedsider that featured the largest-ever database of reproductive health providers.
We incorporated Yelp reviews and a filter to find clinics that provided long-acting methods We allowed clinics to customize their listings by adding photos of their offices and notes about special programs or hours of operation.
The unexpected challenge in offering this feature was ensuring that a search would lead to accurate and helpful results. Rather than starting from scratch, we were able to create our initial database by merging a number of other large databases It quickly became clear, however, that the quality of the listings varied—many were missing data or hadn’t been updated. Ultimately, to create a database we could stand behind, we had to bring on a contractor whose sole job was to investigate and clean up listings, city by city, zip code by zip code.