MomHaven (still curating 👷🔨)
Industry
Postpartum Wellness
Platform
Mobile (IOS)
Tools
Figma, FigJam, Google Forms
Type
Personal Project
Role
Product Designer
Services
Product Design
Description
Designing a postpartum wellness app for Nigerian mothers — from zero to full UX architecture
What I built: A full UX architecture for a postpartum wellness mobile app — 54 screens, 6 user flows, complete design system, every error state, empty state, and crisis intervention path documented.
Why it matters: 1 in 5 Nigerian mothers experience postpartum depression. No existing app was built for this cultural context. I built one that was.
What this case study proves: I can take an ambiguous, high-stakes problem, make a series of difficult design decisions under real constraints, and produce work that is ready to hand directly to a developer or use as a Figma annotation reference.
OVERVIEW
Most postpartum wellness apps were designed for someone else.
They assume a user who is already comfortable seeking mental health support. They use clinical language in a space that demands warmth. They were built in the US or UK and ported everywhere else. For Nigerian mothers — navigating a culture that prizes emotional resilience and rarely discusses postpartum struggles openly — these apps don't just fall short. They don't show up at all.
MomHaven is the answer to that gap. A mobile wellness app that brings together peer community, expert access, and daily mood tracking — designed from the ground up for this specific cultural context, this specific user, and this specific emotional reality.
This is a speculative project. I built it because the problem deserved a serious response, and because building something real from nothing is a better proof of capability than polishing something that already existed.
THE PROBLEM
The surface problem: New mothers in Nigeria have no culturally grounded digital support system for postpartum mental health.
The deeper problem: The stigma isn't just a feature of the user — it's a feature of the environment. A woman who has been told her whole life that struggling after childbirth is weakness won't open an app that looks and sounds like a hospital. She needs something that meets her where she is, speaks the way she speaks, and doesn't make her feel like a patient.
The design consequence: Every single decision in this product — the navigation, the copy, the anonymity model, the crisis flow, the colour palette — had to be made through that lens first.
RESEARCH & COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Before touching Figma, I needed to understand why every existing solution was failing this user.
I reviewed three leading postpartum wellness apps — Momma App, Canopie, and Better After Baby — across onboarding, community design, expert access, tone of voice, and cultural fit.
App | What They Got Right | Critical Gap |
|---|---|---|
Momma App | Strong peer community, relatable content tone | Western-centric language, no expert booking, no mood tracking |
Canopie | Evidence-based CBT content, clinical credibility | Cold tone, no community layer, assumes user is therapy-ready |
Better After Baby | Comprehensive postpartum content library | No community, no direct expert access, heavy paywall |
The pattern: Every app treats postpartum wellness as a universal, culture-agnostic experience. None were built with Nigerian social dynamics as a starting assumption — not the extended family pressure, not the religious frameworks around motherhood, not the deeply ingrained "strong woman" narrative that makes asking for help feel like failure.
Three white spaces that became MomHaven's product bets:
→ Cultural context as a product feature Not "we support all backgrounds" in a footer. Built from the ground up — language, imagery, crisis resources, expert matching criteria — all anchored in Nigerian postpartum reality.
DESIGN PROCESS
Four decisions. Not four phases.
Decision 1 — Map everything before designing anything Full IA documented before opening Figma. 54 screens, 7 sections, every edge case. Caught three flow problems before they became expensive design mistakes.
Decision 2 — Bottom navigation, because users are holding a baby Evaluated three patterns. The answer was obvious once I held the real constraint: a tired, one-handed user who can't stretch her thumb across a screen. Bottom tabs. Five items. Done.
Decision 3 — Three steps, not one form One long mood entry form at 2am is a wall. Three short focused steps create momentum instead of friction. Same information. Completely different experience.
Decision 4 — The crisis flow has to be invisible Designed to be there when needed, invisible when not. Every word chosen precisely. Nothing clinical. Nothing alarming. Just: "You don't have to feel this way alone."
HOW I WORKED WITH AI
I used Claude AI throughout this project as a thinking partner. Transparency on what that means:
What AI contributed: Scaffolding the information architecture, generating microcopy drafts for all 54 screens, producing competitor analysis frameworks, and pressure-testing user flow logic.
What I owned: Every cultural decision. Every copy edit that didn't feel right for this audience. Every navigation choice. The crisis flow structure. The design system direction. The decision to treat anonymity as a first-class feature. The decision to break the mood log into three steps. Every choice that required understanding the human being on the other end.
Why this matters: Working with AI in 2026 is a professional skill. Using it to go faster on scaffolding while protecting the decisions that require human judgment is how good work gets done. This project is proof that I know the difference between the two.
01 — Daily Mood Log
Three steps. Under 60 seconds. An emoji mood selector, symptom tags across 10 options, and a rotating daily journal prompt that changes every day so it never feels repetitive. After 7 entries, the data becomes Mood Insights — trend charts and pattern summaries written in language that sounds like a reflection, not a report. A safety layer sits underneath the entire flow: consistent low-mood entries quietly surface crisis support.
02 — Community Circles
Six topic-based spaces organising conversation by what users are actually going through: Sleep & Rest, Anxiety & Fear, Feeding & Body, C-Section Recovery, Relationships & Identity, Celebrate Wins. Users post openly or anonymously with one tap. When anonymous, their name becomes "Anonymous Mama" and their photo becomes a flower icon.
That one design decision — anonymous as opt-in, not opt-out — is what separates a community people will be honest in from one they'll perform wellness for.
03 — Expert Session Booking
A curated directory of postpartum specialists — counsellors, psychologists, and coaches who understand Nigerian cultural dynamics. Filter by speciality, session type (Chat, Voice, or Video), and real-time availability. Book in under 5 taps. No referrals. No waiting rooms. Pre-session notes optional. Post-session ratings feed a recommendation system that improves matching over time.
04 — Mood Insights
Unlocks after 7 entries. Weekly trend charts, most common emotional tags, and AI-generated insight cards — all written the way a thoughtful friend would say it, not the way a diagnostic tool would report it. The goal is self-awareness, not self-diagnosis.
REFLECTIONS
What this project taught me about design that I will carry into every job:
Starting from the right culture changes every decision downstream. Not "how do we localise this?" but "what does this look like when we start here?" Two completely different questions with completely different answers. I won't forget that.
The hardest design problems are about tone, not layout. The crisis screen, the anonymous toggle, the journal prompt — none of these were layout problems. They were tone problems. Getting them right required understanding the human being on the other side, not the component library.
Working fast and working well are not opposites. AI-assisted scaffolding let me move at a pace that would have been impossible alone. But speed only serves the work when the judgment underneath it is sound. Knowing where to slow down is the skill.
Design for your most depleted user. If it works for someone running on three hours of sleep, holding a baby in the dark, it works for everyone. I now apply this constraint to every product I design.
