MyDoula

Designing for behaviour change when the payoff comes late

Babyhelfer was a research project at FH Potsdam (2020–2022), co-led by Prof. Reto Wettach (Service Design / IxDS, ex-IDEO, ex-Interaction Design Institute Ivrea). The goal: help pregnant women prevent or ease tokophobia — the fear of childbirth — through a digital tool built on established therapeutic methods. We called the app MyDoula.

The team included psychologists and therapists who owned the clinical content. I was the only designer — the entire design side of the project was mine.

To test the methods, we built an 8-week course for expecting mothers, starting around week 25, delivered through a real Android app installed on participants' own phones and used for the full eight weeks.

Sole designer, end to end

• Research and validation — in-depth interviews with participants (both those who completed the course and those who dropped out), 4 detailed questionnaires (2 before, 2 after), and in-app behavioural analytics: which features got used, and how consistently people actually did the exercises.
• Product design — every screen and flow in the app, plus a reusable component library handed to the developer, who built it natively in Kotlin.
• Recruitment and communication — project identity, the recruitment website, social media, infographics, posters.
• Working with the clinical team — turning the psychologists' and therapists' methods into exercises people could actually do on a phone.

Therapy pays off slowly; people stay with what pays off fast

For eight weeks, expecting mothers had to keep doing exercises whose benefit — less fear, more calm heading into birth — wouldn't fully land until much later. Cheap dopamine, the Instagram kind, builds a pull instantly. A product that's genuinely good for you but rewards you later doesn't get that for free.

That tension — real therapeutic value versus a delayed payoff — was the design problem underneath everything.

Small daily steps and a reminder of your own

The product that went into the 8-week pilot:

• Short daily exercises built from the therapists' methods — small, doable actions rather than long sessions.
• A reminder the user set themselves — they chose the time that fit their day.
• Longer, optional deep-dive content for people who wanted to go further.
• The whole product surface around it — onboarding, the exercise flows, the component library.

Product = service = behaviour = habit

The behavioural analytics plus the interviews surfaced a pattern I hadn't designed for. The women who did the exercises consistently almost always tied them to a routine they already had — some to their "me time," some to a ritual in bed before sleep. Once the time was fixed, the exercises just happened: no daily decision about "when," no guilt over a missed slot.

The ones it didn't click for only did the exercises when they happened to remember. Looking at why, three groups emerged:

• they needed a different message, closer to their own values;
• we hadn't helped them build the habit in the first place;
• or they weren't our audience — no pronounced fears, support already around them.

The self-set reminder turned out to be the quiet hero: participants said they were motivated and the exercise was easy, but without a routine they'd forget — and the reminder tipped them into doing it.

The conviction I've carried since: when the payoff is delayed, retention doesn't come from the value of the features — it comes first from building a habit.

To be precise about the timeline: MyDoula didn't ship a habit-forming system. This was what the study taught me. The Fogg Behaviour Model and Self-Determination Theory came later still — frameworks I reached for to explain what the data had already shown.

A full loop, validated with real users

• The recruitment channels and visuals I designed raised research enrolment by 75%.
• In a pilot with 100+ participants, the app scored 80–90% positive usability.
• The main qualitative result was the routine itself — many women said in interviews that they now miss that time.

The project was time-boxed to two years and ended with its funding; MyDoula stayed in closed testing. The value for me is the full loop: field research → insight → a working product in real users' hands → validation with behavioural data, in a sensitive clinical-research context.

Habit as the backbone

The next version would treat habit formation as the backbone, not a happy accident: exercises anchored to an existing daily action from day one, a short "showing-up" loop before any longer commitment, and messaging split by what different women actually value — not one voice for everyone.