Access, Period: Making Menstrual Products Accessible for All
Contributors: Zach Cheung, Elizabeth McKinnie, Robin Yeh, and Joyce Zhou
When we interviewed staff of homeless shelters and a woman who visits the shelter, we found that that the lack of accessibility to menstrual products for homeless and low-income women is due to a variety of factors. The shelter staff we interviewed told us that one of the main barriers for donators is that donators don’t know what people need or what exactly they should donate. For shelters that rely on donations, there are not enough menstrual products available, nor is there enough variety. As a result, there’s a short supply of products that are in high demand and a lot of other products that aren’t as popular, so a lot of women who visit shelters end up receiving products that aren’t as useful to them, such as panty liners. Some women have to travel long distances to visit a shelter or have to visit several shelters to find the products they want. Sometimes this means they bleed through their pants before they can find menstrual products. They simply do not have easy access to menstrual products, which is a basic human right.
Our Solution
Access, Period provides an interface for both donators and homeless and low-income women, thus closing the gap between the two groups. Our idea is based on trust: donators can directly donate products and women can collect the products they need. We decided to go with an interface that allows the donator to directly donate menstrual products to public dispensers. Donators have control of the type of product and the amount they are donating. We learned that most homeless women nowadays have access to smartphones, so we decided to incorporate an app in addition to our public dispensers to better serve homeless and low-income women. The app provides an interface that helps these women to find a public dispenser that is within reasonable proximity to them with the products the want. They can then travel to the dispensers and collect products as needed. The app is designed for women who need products and cannot afford them, but women looking to donate could use the app to locate public dispensers that need to be stocked.
First Prototype
To evaluate our initial design, we built an easily modifiable paper prototype of our design to use for testing purposes. The app prototype consisted of a phone-sized frame on sheets of paper, while the dispenser prototype consisted of a paper touch screen mounted on a shoebox with dispenser slots cut into it. To evaluate our designs, we conducted heuristic evaluations by letting other designers explore interacting with our design. Then we conducted usability tests with college-aged women, who we gave two specific tasks (“find a nearby stocked dispenser” and “retrieve the product you would prefer to use from the dispenser”) them to achieve using the app and the dispenser, respectively.
Testing and Results
Our most useful feedback about the app came from heuristic evaluations. Our evaluators found the lack of a tutorial to be confusing and they were unable to effectively use the interface without a brief explanation. Furthermore, they thought that our original design which showed the stock of each dispenser was hard to read. To address these major issues, we added an introduction to the app with its purpose, tutorial cards explaining the map interface, and detail bubbles for each dispenser, as well as functionality in the detail bubbles themselves that includes location, a labelled table, and a “Get Directions” button for the dispenser.
We also received impactful feedback about the dispenser from heuristic evaluations. Evaluators found our original product collection and product donation screens to be unclear: they had no way of knowing what the stock was in the dispenser because we only showed a tally for how many products they wanted to collect, and error messages during donation were uninformative. To fix this, we added a column showing the current stock of each item during product collection. We also added unique error messages for each type of common mistake that donators could make.
During usability testing, users were mostly confused with how to interact with the paper prototype, but that was a shortcoming of our testing procedure and not of the prototype itself. Overall, as a result of our modifications from heuristic evaluation, usability testing went smoothly and largely confirmed that our design was intuitive to use.
Digital Prototype
Mobile application
Here is the link to our complete interactive digital mockup for our mobile application. The goal of our mobile application is to help homeless and low-income women locate dispensers that have the menstrual products they want. To do this, our app has a map interface where we pin the dispensers that are currently stocked near the user and provides information about the dispensers. We made one minor change to the digital prototype of our app after receiving feedback: we added the “estimated hours before empty” column, represented by the clock emoji, in the description bubble for each dispenser.
When the app is first downloaded (or when the help button in the search bar is clicked), we provide a tutorial of our app. One screen of the tutorial is shown in the first panel. We provide information on the project, how to find dispensers, and how to interact with the pins. The main function of the application is the map interface, shown in the second panel. We allow for users to scroll around and search for locations using the search bar. When the user taps on a pin marking a dispenser, information on location, products, and availability are displayed, shown in the third panel. The “Get Directions” button takes the user to a maps application.
Dispenser
Here is the link to our complete interactive digital mockup for our dispenser. Once someone locates a dispenser either through the mobile application or by finding one in public, our dispenser fulfills its goal: providing access to menstrual products in public spaces outside of typical pick-up places such as shelters. Our dispenser allows users to collect menstrual products that are stored within the dispenser and are stocked with donations. Our dispenser updates with the mobile application ensuring that our users know when their preferred products are available near them. Based on feedback, we made the dispenser more visually appealing by rounding the corners of the buttons. We also made the slots smaller to dissuade people from donating products that are not menstrual products.
Our mockup shows the entire dispenser with the white touchscreen in the middle and our Donate and Collect flaps located above and below. The home screen of our dispenser indicates the two options of donating and collecting and provides additional information about the project, as well as a QR code to download the app and functionality to report a problem with the machine (first panel). Donators are required to answer a few questions as an initial filter to ensure that the dispenser only accepts usable menstrual products, shown in the second panel. When collecting products, women are able to select as many products as they like (shown in the third panel), which will be dispensed once they are done selecting.
Conclusion
Through our research conducted with homeless shelter staff and a woman visiting the shelter, we identified the need for menstrual products in more accessible locations than just shelters. We also saw the benefit of providing information about where those products are located so that the women who need them can more easily find the products they want close to their location. Access, Period addresses both of these issues by providing publicly available dispensers powered by donations and an app to locate those dispensers. It also circumvents some of the issues shelters have with donators, because donators can use the app to see what dispensers need products or can simply donate whatever they have on hand. Regardless of what products are donated, the app will allow women to find dispensers that have the products they want. We believe that our system will help homeless and low-income women get the menstrual products they need by ensuring access, period.
