Final Project — Ironhack — Yoni
“How might we foster sorority by bringing women together so that they feel safer when they occupy public space, changing society’s view of harassment against women?”
That was our inspiration to create Yoni!
This text is co-wrote by Simone Ferreira and Marina Merlin(me!), UX/UI Designers and we will show you everything from understanding, creating to delivering this project, our final project for the UX/UI Bootcamp in IronHack.
Why a product for women?
Some context before explaining our theme
In our childhood, we “learned” that women are competitors, that we should judge each other, that we should compare ourselves and much more.
We’ve met at Ironhack but we both are graduated in architecture. During our university, we could observe the same, women were the majority. However, when we are talking about professional life, men are the majority in higher positions.
Things have changed a little when we were at Ironhack. We were 13 students, 7 women, and 6 men. It’s a good balance. Furthermore, we have a woman professor with a huge background and an impressive career. She was an example to us. There we had the chance to become a good friend of other women, and exchange a lot of knowledge and support each other.
We learned a lot, especially that together we are stronger.
Both of us had the idea of doing something for women in our final project. Marina had the idea of creating a feature to help women in a risk situation. Simone had the idea of creating a platform where women could learn about positive sexuality.
Quantitative Research
Violence against women and Sexuality
Violence against women
The numbers above were collected in a quantitative survey of men and women of all ages, mostly women between 25 and 34 years. In this research I could see some contradictions regarding what men feel and what women suffer on a daily basis. Almost 77% of the women who responded to the survey said they had been harassed while 100% of men said they had never been harassed, and just over half of them had never seen harassment occur.
More than 50% of women told other people about the harassment they suffered, and approximately 20% of the women who answered the survey said they did not tell anyone because of fear of being judged, or that it was not an important thing to be spoken.
Another thing our research showed was that women rarely get help from other people present at the time of harassment, only 18% of them received, 59% of women received no support either before or after the incident.
This research was anonymous and we left a space where women, or men, could share anything they wanted with us. And in these reports we could see that harassment comes in all forms and from everywhere. Women can dress in any way or be in places they think are safe and yet be harassed.
Sexuality
The numbers above came from a survey that asked 1370 women from Brazil, most of them from South and Southeast, ages between 21 and 40 years old (83%). 76% are heterosexual, 87% monogamous when in a relationship.
Only 16% of them have pleasure in penetration and 27% enjoy most when their partner does oral sex or when they are touched in the clitoris, 22%. When it’s about masturbation, 70% enjoy touching the clitoris directly, and 67% using only their hands and 21% stimulating themselves with some vibrator.
Only 43% of them talk openly with their partners about sex.
Some women still have limitations or difficulty in raising sexuality issues. They still feel pressured to reach orgasm during penetration.
The majority of women have never had sex education or the focus has always been on the negative perspective involving the risks and consequences of the sexual act.
Qualitative Research
Violence against women
We spoke with some women and men about harassment and violence, we asked about how they feel walking in dark streets, or commuting in a big city and the results of the quantitative survey were validated.
The women said that they often call their partners to pick them up when they feel that the path is considered dangerous or when it's dark. They try to go close to other people or if they see another woman walking alone the tend to walk close to them so both can feel safer.
We asked about what they would do if something bad happen with other woman around them, men said that they would help if the woman requests, but women in my research said that if they feel they could help they would approach the other woman by telling a name so the person who is harassing would think that she knows her. We could hear that man can also think if they come to help they would be misinterpreted by the woman as a person who can harass her.
Sexuality
We asked some women about their sexual life and their relation with their bodies, self-esteem. Below what we have heard:
- Women who know their bodies are more confident and can express their desires to their partner
- They learn on Youtube and Instagram
- Many women don’t masturbate because of shame or guilty
- Some think that the partner should know what she likes about sex.
- Some talk with friends about sex but many don’t feel comfortable doing it
Affinity diagram
We organized our ideas and data in common themes to analyze and discover the relations to allow a design direction based on the associations.
We have separated the topics we had into 5 categories: Sexuality, Male Chauvinist, Sorority and Help, Feminism and Values.
From these, we highlighted the keywords to identify what was drawing our attention most to the problem. This led us to a great analysis of the problem.
“Young women need to find a way to get to know themselves and feel safe because they want to express themselves without being judged by society.” (Problem Statement)
We decided that in addition to addressing the issue of sexuality and abuse, we want to help women empower and help each other.
“How can we foster sorority by bringing women together so that they feel safer when they occupy public space, changing society’s view of harassment against women?” (HMW)
“How can we approach and empower women to face taboos and social stigma together and find quality information to know and express themselves without judgment?
We want to develop a platform that is a support for women all day long, that she finds information and questions and transforms her mindset so that she does not block herself because of taboos and social stigmas.
Personas
We created three personas to help us to understand our users.
User Journey
The journey map was used to help us to identify when users interact with the product. We briefly described a day of our personas to support our design decisions.
Competitive Analysis
From our competitors, we realized that they are not attending everything we want to achieve in our platform.
Brand Personality
We ran some tests with people around us, we showed them some illustrations and the colors that we wanted to use in our product and they chose words to describe the personality of the brand.
Card Sorting
From the topics that we did a card sorting with different users to understand how they would organize them. We did that on Figma using “virtual post its”. The first 3 users did an open card sorting. From them, we got the categories name and we asked more 2 users to do a closed card sorting.
Open Card sorting:
Choosing the Categories:
Closed Card Sorting:
Site Map
We created a site map to organize the navigation of the application.
Design
We used the "Crazy 8" Technique to do some sketches for our mobile version.
Style Guide
Low Fidelity — App
Hi-Fidelity
We have used Figma to create our wireframes. Here are some screens:
You can check our interactive prototype and more about the images and the illustration on our behance post!
Prototype — Video
Presentation
We’ve presented to our classmates, professor, teacher assistant, and manager. All the projects were evaluated from everybody and our project was selected to be presented to guests at night on the hackashow.
Hackshow
The Hackshow is Ironhack “demo day”, where people interested in technology and all students are invited to see the highlight projects. Them we had the pleasure of presenting our project to them.
