‍The Challenge

The Start4Life programme (part of Public Health England) aims to support people in their journey into parenthood. One of their major focus areas for them is supporting new mums in the first few weeks of parenthood getting to grips with breastfeeding.  There is also a lot of  overwhelming, conflicting and not always judgement-free advice available on the internet. The Start4Life team wanted to find a new way of reaching young parents and provide their trusted advice support in a more user-led way.

The Insights

• Although health professionals can provide invaluable support, they are not always available. Often, it was the 1, 2 or 3am feeds that mums reported feeling the most lonely and unsupported during. 
• Breastfeeding is often a two handed job. Mums often report frustration and issues when trying to read advice on their phone in one hand, whilst holding their child in the other. 
• For such a personal and intimate use-case, delivering sympathetic support was going to be vital to establish trust and drive engagement. 
  

‍The Solution‍

Part One: Voice App Development 

Working closely with Mindshare, we designed and developed Breastfeeding Friend; the NHS’s first publicly available voice experience aimed at supporting new mums learning the new skill of breastfeeding. The service delivers advice, quick tips, timers, surveys and a feeding log feature. All content is delivered in the soothing recorded voice of BFF and was extensively tested with Mumsnet users.‍

Part Two: Strategic Service Review‍

After the service had been live in the market for over a year, we conducted a wholesale strategic review of the service.

This pulled together:

• Proposition Review and re-alignment.
• In-depth User Testing and Analytics Review.
• Competitor benchmarking and Future Trends identification.
• Technical and UX Review.
• Exploring test and learn, beta opportunities.
• Marketing effectiveness review and recommendations.
  

We developed a medium and long-term roadmap for optimisation and a re-alignment of the service to better meet the end-users needs and Public Health England’s wider objectives for the programme

A detailed roadmap was developed along with a robust system of strategic review and monitoring put in place to ensure success in the long-term.

More Information HERE

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