Bethany Corbin and Theresa Neil delve into core topics in UX design for femtech founders including early product design strategies, common design mistakes to avoid, and the crucial role of trust and inclusivity in women’s health products.
For anyone interested in the cutting-edge world of femtech and health technology, this episode of FemInnovation is a must-listen. Hosted by Bethany Corbin, a leader in women’s health technology, the podcast delves into the fundamentals of user experience (UX) design with Theresa Neil, Founder and CEO of Guidea. Theresa shares her journey into health technology, emphasizing the importance of UX in developing effective digital health products. They explore the creation of Guidea’s Femovate program, which supports early-stage femtech founders, and discuss key topics such as:
If you’re a femtech founder or someone passionate about innovation in women’s health, this episode offers valuable insights and practical advice to guide your journey. Listen to the podcast (Episode 6) or read the full transcript below.
Want more? You can learn more about FemInnovation and Femovate. If you have any questions or comments, contact us or email Theresa Neil theresa@guidea.com
Bethany:
Hi everyone, and welcome to this episode of FemInnovation. In this episode, we are going to dive into the fundamentals of user experience or UX design with an incredible guest who is passionate about serving femtech founders in this space. So please join me in welcoming Theresa Neil to the show. Theresa is the founder and CEO at Guidea, which is a women-owned women-led UX consultancy with extensive product and design strategy expertise in Health Tech and MedTech. Guidea has worked with 20 of the Fortune 100 companies and has served clients such as Adobe, Bloomberg, eBay, Whole Foods, and Johnson & Johnson. Theresa has also been recognized as a top designer in technology by Business Insider, and she's the author of Mobile Design Pattern Gallery and the co-author of Designing Web Interfaces. Her passion for femtech led her to launch Femovate by Guidea, which provides UX sponsorship for early stage femtech founders. And we're going to talk much more about Femovate today for those of you who are interested in applying for the next cohort.
Now, before we officially welcome Theresa, I do want to remind everyone that FemInnovation is partnering with Women's Health Innovation Series 2023. Over the past five years, the Women's Health Innovation Series has become the number one annual event that connects industry-leading stakeholders in women's health. I hope you'll be able to join us in Boston next month on September 14th and 15th. You can purchase tickets at Womenshealthinnovationusa.com. And don't forget to use the code FemInnovation 10 for 10% off your ticket. So welcome to the show, Theresa. I am so excited that you're here with us today.
Theresa:
I'm so excited too. Thanks for having me.
Bethany:
Of course. So I know that I gave a little bit of an overview about the work that you're doing, especially in product and design strategy, but could you tell us more about your journey actually into the product and design strategy spaces for health technology and femtech – and really what led you into the femtech field and what made you decide on UX design?
Theresa:
Oh, it has been a fascinating journey and I'm so glad I'm here now. It started off with, I worked as a designer for many years. I have a design company, and we spent a lot of years working with BioPharma, creating adherence applications specifically for tracking medication or recording symptoms. And that was really rewarding because we got to do a lot of research with patients and providers to create these solutions.
But about 10 years ago, I met this company and started consulting for them by the name of WellDoc. And WellDoc is a pioneer in digital therapies, and I had the wonderful opportunity to work with them to do the research and design for one of the first FDA approved digital therapeutics. And this to me was way more rewarding than creating adherence applications because it really gets at the heart of helping people improve their health through behavior change.
And so that was kind of our first, my first foray, our company's first foray into designing really meaningful patient experiences. And then last year we started thinking about how could we help female founders because most of our current client base is male CEOs, male product managers, and I wanted to make sure that we were, as a woman-owned company, we are supporting women in tech. And so we started thinking about how could we do that? And we kind of stumbled upon the femtech industry and we're like, this is it. We have so much background in MedTech and digital health and we want to support not only female founders, but women in general and bring better health outcomes to women around the world. And so we created the Femovate program specifically to help femtech founders. And we know not all femtech founders are female, but everybody in femtech is working towards better health outcomes for women. So that's been our journey and how did we come up with Femovate and how did we get here.
Bethany:
I love it. And we'll definitely talk more about Femovate later in this show because it's an incredible program and it can help so many founders out there and I know applications are opening. So stay tuned. We're definitely going to talk about that. But I want to start first with some of the basics because for some of our listeners, they may not be as familiar with product design terminology. And I know for instance, for a long time I wasn't either when I was just starting out. So can you tell us what UX design actually is or what that term means?
Theresa:
Sure. So UX is an acronym for User Experience design. We like to think of it in terms of – we're going to use patient and provider research to create digital products. So that can be everything from working with founders and organizations on product strategy and product market fit, where can they innovate in the market, how can they differentiate and provide value? What are some of the table stakes that the product needs to clear in order to even go to market? And then we also support UEX research. So that's that part I was talking about, we do research with patients, providers, payers, employers. Sometimes also if we're not looking at it from a patient lens and it's direct to consumer, we're doing research with the end customer of the product and we take that research and we use it to inform the overall experience of the digital product.
Sometimes it's not just a digital product, sometimes it's an app plus a medical device, or an app plus a product, or an app plus a prescription. And then we actually do the design work of creating the screens, the illustrations, the animation, and then we take that into validation with the end, let's say patients, customers, providers, payers, to make sure that the designs that were research informed actually now have good usability and are going to be effective when they're released into the market. So are people going to be able to use them and really get the value we're hoping from them?
Bethany:
That sounds like it's really important, I would say for all types of founders, especially those in femtech and digital health to actually think about product design strategy and have a good product design roadmap before launching the product. When should startups actually be thinking about product design strategy? Is this something you come in thinking about on day one? Is it something you think about closer to launch? When would somebody consider using the services that you just explained?
Theresa:
Startups should start thinking about product design strategy at the very beginning stages of defining the product. The research that they can do or we can do at that point will inform the overarching product strategy and help save time and effort in avoiding going down a wrong path. So early is better.
Bethany:
I would agree with that because some of the services that you offer are really into that kind of research methodology. What are those end users looking for? I've seen a lot of founders who go down that pathway and they think they have a solution for the end users, but they haven't done the research and then they try to take it to market and it's a bust because it ended up not being what the consumers wanted. So I wholeheartedly agree with your statement that earlier is better. You've talked a lot about what the services are that you all offer, especially when it comes to user experience design. Given your extensive work in the startup and the thumb tech industries, are there common design mistakes that you see founders regularly make?
"I encourage all femtech founders to be very authentic with the solutions that you're bringing forward. Start off early in building trust."
Theresa:
Definitely the most common mistakes we see are that the founders are very close to the material and the problems that they're trying to solve for. And by just taking a couple of steps back to look at the broader customer or patient or provider journey, we can help in just a couple of hours reframe the focus to catch some of those early mistakes. So for example, many founders and teams are so deep in the details of the product that they want to bring to market. They've kind of forgotten that the folks that are going to be using it don't know the vision, they don't have the expertise, they're not really sure what this product is going to provide for them. And so we all just need to take a couple steps back and create a 10,000 foot view of what is the product we're creating, going to solve for the pain points that our users, whether they're patients or providers or customers. And we make sure that that's going to resonate with the audience and that we're clearly articulating it so that people when they come into the app really understand the value that the app or the product is going to provide, and then can follow along and get the benefit from it. A lot of times the designs that we see drop the user into the app or into the web application immediately, and there's tons of features and tons of data, but people don't really know how to get started. So that's a common mistake we see.
Bethany:
Interesting because I think that there's this tendency today for founders to think more features, more data. That's what consumers want. That's better. It's interesting that you mentioned taking a step back because I think you're right, just dropping a patient into that experience without any type of guidance or walkthrough can be a little bit daunting, just thinking back to my own experiences with some of the apps. So that's definitely a key piece of advice. And the other that really strikes me is making sure that founders are able to build diverse and inclusive products during these design phases. What are some of the tips or advice that you have for founders on making sure or even testing to ensure that their products are inclusive?
Theresa:
That's a great question. And there's another component to this as well. Not just doing research and testing with a diverse group of users, but also being aware that in femtech, many, many women are experiencing challenges that have been minimized, dismissed, ignored, or not even believed by providers. And so it is incredibly important that as we're creating femtech solutions, that we're authentically bringing trust into the relationship, building reputable products that will really hear what women are saying, see them and respond to the challenges that they're encountering because many of them have had this long tumultuous experience with healthcare that really hasn't set them up for success in their own health and wellness. So I encourage all femtech founders to, again, be very authentic with the solutions that you're bringing forward and start off early in building trust with the evidence and the material, the content that you're bringing forward in these solutions.
Then as far as making sure that this works for everybody, there's some really easy measures to take for that. So basically in the early research that you can do around the product strategy and product market fit, just make sure that you're including a diverse audience. So that could be diversity in location, diversity in age, diversity and issue, economic brackets, diversity in ethnicities, diversity in abilities, and making sure that you have a really good mix of different representations when we do the initial research, talking to both the buyers and the consumers or the patients. And then when we move on farther down the road in the process when there's actually a product created or a prototype ready or ready to go into a pilot, we want to again make sure we have a really diverse base of users for user acceptance testing or any other summative or formative studies that we're running. So it's really about creating a good screener for research and testing and a diverse target mix of participants.
Bethany:
I love how you mentioned inclusivity, expanding not just beyond race and ethnicity, but also geographic location and age, making sure that you're targeting anyone potentially across the globe who could be influenced by or helped by your product. One thing that I hear from founders oftentimes is that they don't necessarily know where to get their early testers or how to ensure that their early test audience is diverse and inclusive. Are there resources or companies out there that you know of that can help with this?
Theresa:
Yes, and I'm super grateful that a number of these companies have popped up recently. One of them is called Fable, and they will help with the recruit to make sure that you have a diverse set of participants for early research as well as downstream usability testing.
Bethany:
Brilliant. And as we think about things that femtech founders should know when commercializing their digital health products, are there any tips or pieces of advice or things that you absolutely wish that femtech founders knew as they're going into their commercialization process for their digital health products?
Theresa:
Absolutely. So when we're moving into the commercialization phase, this is not the time for surprises. So I recommend in the early days of crafting that product strategy, that founders do a really good competitive analysis to make sure that they know what else is already in the market and have a very strong understanding of what's going to differentiate their solution from what's already available. It is heartbreaking to move into the commercialization process and realize that the market's already, say flooded with mental health tools or flooded with marketplaces or communities for the same topic that the team has just spent many months or even years designing and building for. So that upfront competitive analysis is key. And then also really, really staying up with what is being released over time and how the market's responding to it. So that's a big one. That can be a harsh surprise. Yes. Have you seen anybody run into that situation?
Bethany:
Unfortunately, I have. It's interesting that you mention differentiation and finding that out at the outset. I can't tell you how many times I've heard investors say that the one thing you have to prove to them is differentiation because even though the femtech market is still relatively young, we are starting to see portions of the market get saturated with similar solutions. And it doesn't mean that the market's saturated and you shouldn't innovate in that area. It means we need different innovations or taking it to the next level. And so I think just like you mentioned for founders to know early on how their product is different, that's going to help them not only attract consumers, but also get the investment that they desperately need to bring their products to life. And I've never thought about it as doing a competitive analysis, but I love that terminology. Is that something, for instance, that a company, let's say that you're a new femtech company out there with an idea and you haven't really developed your product yet. Is that a good time you think to say, Hey, maybe we need to engage Theresa or a firm to do a competitive analysis before we get too far down the road?
Theresa:
I would even encourage founders to do that themselves, or at least take the first steps. They can always check with a mentor or a team like ours for help with that, but this is something founders can absolutely do on their own. It involves a little bit of desk research, a lot of Googling. There's lots of great tech communities out there where you can post questions to see what other people have heard is happening, other products people are using maybe in a tangential space or in this exact space. There's a number of reports out there available to help with competitive analysis, like the femtech landscape report, which has a list of many of the femtech companies across, it's like 18 or 20 different verticals. That's a good place to start looking. And then there's another report out there that looks at emerging femtech IP looking through the filed patents. And so that's another place to look and see what might be going on, especially if you're working on a medical device to see what else was happening.
Bethany:
Yeah, no, that's interesting. I knew about the general femtech landscape report, but I wasn't aware that there was one for emerging IP. That's exciting, and I'll make sure to include that link in the show notes for anyone who's interested.
Bethany:
Theresa, I want to talk now going back to something that you mentioned at the beginning of the show, which is that in 2022 you launched a new program called Femovate, which is a sponsorship program dedicated to creating or improving product and design for femtech innovators. And I understand that applications recently opened for the 2023 cohort. So I was wondering if you could tell our audience a bit more about what Femovate is, why you started that program, and how femtech founders can benefit by joining.
Theresa:
Thank you for asking. This is absolutely my new mission is to support femtech founders and make sure that they are able to commercialize the amazing innovations that we're seeing come in. The call for applications is July 20th through September 18th, 2023. It'll be announced on Women of Wearables, femtech Insider, Fem Health Insights, and of course on your podcast. It will also be available on Femovate.com. And so like you said, this is a UX sponsorship program for early stage femtech founders, so pre-seed, seed series A founders. And what we are doing is we will speak with each and every team that applies to understand what they're hoping to bring to market, and we will select a handful of the teams. Last year we were going to select two to three teams and invest about $50,000 in services. We were absolutely blown away by the caliber of applicants, and we ended up selecting 30 teams and we're close to $800,000 of services invested so far – Wow.
So this year I say we're going to pick a couple, we'll see what that turns out to be, but we want to meet with each and every team that has a femtech solution. So I want to emphasize the tech part because we do get a lot of applicants from people who have created really amazing CPG consumer packaged goods, but it has to have a tech element in order for us to be able to help the team. So if it is an amazing new period panty or it is a great new over the counter medication for UTIs, if it doesn't have a tech component, we won't be able to support the team. If it's a medical device, if it's software as a medical device, a digital therapeutic, an online support community, a companion app, those are definitely in our wheelhouse and things that we can help teams with.
"We were absolutely blown away by the caliber of applicants, and we ended up selecting 30 teams and we're close to $800,000 of services invested so far"
Bethany:
That's exciting. So I know you mentioned the CPG limitation falling outside of the scope of the Femovate program. Are there any other restrictions on who should apply or requirements that you have for applicants?
Theresa:
There are a few other things listed on the website. So we are looking at a subset of all tech verticals because those are the ones that we have expertise in and we can provide the most value to founders. And so that is listed on the Femovate application site, as well as product type. So our company Guidea has the most expertise with, again, digital health companion apps, digital therapeutics software as a medical device. We're also great at working with building communities and software, any type of provider software, healthcare, health tech products. And so there's a list there of product types that we would be able to provide the most help with. So product types that fall out of that list, we're still happy to review the application, but if we don't have the deep skillset, we probably won't accept the team that needs something outside of our sweet spot.
Bethany:
That makes sense. And do founders need any type of prior experience bringing products to life or in the digital marketplace, or do they have to have undergone an accelerator program? Any requirements for founders?
Theresa:
That's a great question. So we do love to meet with teams who have prior product experience – that could be any prior digital product experience. They could have worked as a copywriter or a quality assurance tester that could have been a developer, a designer, project manager, product manager. However, when we ran Femovate for the first time last year, we had many applicants that were clinicians or pelvic floor PTs, people who are working in the industry actually providing healthcare. And so we want to encourage them to apply as well, even if they don't have any digital product background. It is nice. A couple of brownie points if you have experience going through another accelerator or incubator and have learned a little bit about product strategy and the challenges involved with bringing digital products to market.
Bethany:
Fantastic. I know it's been almost a year since you did the first Femovate cohort. Have there been any kind of key takeaways or wins or things you'd like to share from that experience?
Theresa:
Oh my goodness. We have had such an amazing run with the teams that we selected and additional teams have popped up over this past year that we've rolled into the Femovate program as well. And I have to say I'm just really honored that these founders have brought us into the fold and allowed us to help shape the vision for their products. And as far as wins, I am incredibly proud of the teams we’ve helped in the past year. I think across all 30 teams, they've taken home probably in the neighborhood of two dozen different awards. Some of them local, some of them global. They have raised collectively at least $30 million and there are another 15 products either live in the market now or going into clinical trials or studies. So these teams collectively have had a lot of progress and a lot of momentum and are much closer to, they're either actually in the market or close to commercialization or moving into clinical studies.
Bethany:
Wow, that is impressive. And to think that you have invested so much of your time, your energy, your resources into helping these femtech companies, Theresa, truly a remarkable thing that you're doing. And so for anyone who's interested, I highly encourage you to apply to this program. It's a fantastic experience, and working with Theresa is going to be something you won't regret.
Theresa:
I just want to give a shout out to my team as well. Femovate is not just me working with founders, it's my entire team, including my partner Jessica Gentry who helps run Guidea and Karin Dahlstrom who is helping me run Femovate as well as some of our fantastic designers and researchers, including Khati, and Rebecca, Nine, and Claire.
Bethany:
Now Theresa, I want to switch gears just for a few minutes because we actually came together for something that was entirely unrelated to UX design. So we met through a discussion about the inaccuracies that we see in some femtech products. And I had written an article in Med Device Online a few months ago exposing some of the startling statistics about the accuracy of some femtech products on the market and that a lot of these inaccuracies were happening in products that were not subject to FDA review. They were falling under the FDA's enforcement discretion. They weren't requiring things like clinical trials or medical or scientific evidence to prove accuracy.
And some of the products that I had caught out in that article were period tracking and ovulation tracking apps. So I just wanted to get your insights. Do you think that product inaccuracies are harmful to women's health or what has been your experience from the design side?
Theresa:
I think product inaccuracies are harmful to health across the board, not just women's health. And I was a little surprised at different articles that I've seen targeting femtech in particular when really this is a Health tech and a MedTech problem, not just a femtech problem. I was looking and it appears that there's something in the neighborhood of like 10,000 mental health apps in the market. And after hours of research so far, we can only find that a couple of them are FDA approved out of 10,000. Many of them don't have anything that speaks to being scientifically backed. A handful of them are noted as supported by science evidence-based or research-informed. And those terms “supported by science,” “evidence-based,” and “research informed” simply mean that they may have used techniques like CBT Cognitive Behavior therapy in the app and that the CBT itself is evidence-based. It hasn't actually been tested on how it was incorporated in the mental health app that's in the market.
And so again, I don't think this is a femtech exclusive problem. I think this is a health tech issue where people are unknowingly downloading an app to say lose weight or stop smoking or track their period or eat healthy, drink more water, and they may not be getting accurate information from the app at all. They might actually be getting bad advice.
Bethany:
I agree completely, and I love how you said, right, this isn't a femtech problem, it's health tech in general. A lot of the problems that we see in femtech are generalizable across health tech, and it's interesting the period tracking and the ovulation tracking apps get a bad rep. But as you just mentioned, mental health apps, those are hugely downloaded across the globe and sometimes there's not, depending on what the product is or the app is, sometimes there aren't even necessary privacy and security restrictions and protections built into the application, let alone the fact that you are downloading something that may be inaccurate or not scientifically vetted or have no medical oversight at all. I think that was one of the things that was really surprising to me when I first joined the femtech community was just the lack of clinician oversight into a lot of these products. So definitely not something we're seeing in all femtech products by any means, especially those that undergo FDA review and approval. But one of the other things, Theresa, that I know you've done some research on is the products for femtech that have been approved by the FDA. Do you have a sense of how many tech products may have actually been approved by the FDA under the five-10 K or the pre-market approval pathways?
Theresa:
I'm actually still researching this, and I need to give a shout out to Karen and Ange on my team who have been doing the majority of this research. We have not been able to find a good central source for FDA approved software as a medical device or digital therapeutics, which falls under that category. It's fairly easy to find which pharmaceuticals have been FDA approved as well as standard products and medical devices, but we're not finding a centralized list of this. So we're having to go through one by one articles and check and see if specific teams have received FDA approval. So a couple of the apps that we've found in the femtech space that have FDA clearance is from a company, one of them is from a company called Woebot Health. They have a mental health app and they have created a variation of it called WBOO1 oh one, and it has received breakthrough device designation from the FDA as a digital therapeutic for postpartum depression. So that is one of them that we've identified. We're working with a handful of teams that are prepping their products to go into the clinical studies that will eventually lead to fingers crossed FDA approval, but it is hard to find a source or a full list of just the ones in the femtech space.
"...product inaccuracies are harmful to health across the board, not just women's health. Many [apps] don't have anything that speaks to being scientifically backed."
Bethany:
So Theresa, from a design perspective, are there certain things that femtech founders should be doing to ensure that they're educating consumers about the scientific and medical backing for their products given the issues that we've identified with inaccuracies?
Theresa:
Oh yeah. I think it actually goes back a little bit farther in the process and not just the copy on the product once it's commercialized or available for use. It goes back to really in the early stage about thinking about the product strategy and what type of solution are we creating. Are we creating a community like Electra where women perimenopausal and menopausal women can connect together and learn about menopause and like they say, smash the taboo, or are we creating a digital therapeutic or software as a medical device that actually needs to go through clinical trials and achieve FDA approval? If the solution falls in that category, very early on we need to start thinking about formative studies and conducting those properly. So it's a type of research that needs to be done early on to make sure that we're using patient and provider research to inform the design and the solution so that when we get closer to the point of needing to do an HFE study human factors engineering study, that becomes part of the packaging for ultimate FDA approval that we have the right things in place.
So we have done formative studies correctly, then we've conducted the summative study with that diverse participant base we were talking about, so that we've established that the product has good usability that's going to support the underlying clinically-based product solution that is going to go in for FDA approval. So it's much earlier in the process than just labeling the app. It's in thinking about what are we even going to bring to market? Does this need to go through FDA approval or in Europe, get the CE mark, and how do we structure a product roadmap that's going to incorporate and ladder up all of the different levels of testing that are needed to have that clinical product go to market down the road?
Bethany:
Fantastic. Are there any other resources that you think are important to share with femtech founders as they're embarking on their product design journey?
Theresa:
Well, if a femtech founder is creating a solution that they're hoping to take through FDA approval, I actually really recommend the FDA government site. It has a wealth of information and the folks that are maintaining that are trying really hard to put current resources out there for everybody to review. So that is actually the FDA government site. It's actually a really great resource. Another great resource that I highly recommend for all femtech founders are books and articles – and I will send you some of those links, Bethany, so you can link them in the podcast – around product management and product strategy because as an early stage founder, you're the product owner, you're the innovator, and you're also moving the product forward. And so not all of us have had the opportunity to go to school and take a lot of classes on how to be a great product owner or a great product manager, but there are some quick courses online for this as well as some books and articles that can give you some of the key capabilities to do a good job at that. I've noticed, I've talked to quite a few founders recently who are very early stage, and they're talking about hiring in a product owner right away. And I'm encouraging these very, very early stage founders to actually broaden their skills to be a really great product owner themselves and maybe instead invest money in a CTO or finding a really good development team or potentially a really great business partner if they don't have a business background. But yeah, resources around becoming a great product strategist and product owner will be very beneficial.
Bethany:
I love it. Yes, Theresa, as soon as you send me those, I'll link them in the show notes for everyone. Those are going to be some really crucial resources. So this has been so enlightening, Theresa. I'm thrilled to have you here to share your expertise and talk about product design and product strategy. If people want to get in touch with you or learn more about what you're doing or Femovate, where can they find you?
Theresa:
They can go to Femovate.com, F-E-M-O-V-A-T-E .com or, and or they can follow me, Theresa Neil on LinkedIn and follow Femovate on LinkedIn. And it comes up as Femovate by Guidea because Femovate is a program that our parent company, Guidea, the UX agency, is running.
Bethany:
Perfect. And we will include all of those links as well. So thank you again, Theresa, so lovely to talk to you and to our listeners, thank you for tuning in. Please continue to subscribe if you'd like to hear the next episodes as soon as they're available. And if you enjoyed this episode or other episodes that we've done so far, please give us a rating on Apple Podcast. We look forward to seeing you at the next episode.
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