Designing a personalised and empathetic app for charity Tommy’s

Tommy’s is the largest charity funding research into the causes of stillbirth, miscarriage and premature birth in the UK. With 60,000 babies born prematurely each year, providing information for parents (and those to-be) means they can empower and support them throughout their journey. The charity had an app that was no longer fit for purpose and in need of a complete redevelopment. We led the end-to-end process of redesigning, redeveloping and relaunching the app.

Premature birth and stillbirth can cause extreme trauma, anxiety and uncertainty for many parents. We quickly recognised that the experience for each parent is truly unique throughout their journey- and so the app supports parents both before the birth, and after, in different ways and in a personalised way. We saw this as an opportunity for Tommy’s to provide a digital tool that could truly make a positive impact on people’s lives, by providing useful, practical and emotional support, for all parents in need of it.

We focused on creating a dynamic experience that provided personalised content based on where the user is in their pregnancy journey. Pre-birth, the app shares valuable educational content around risks. Once the baby is born, the app switches to tracking progress. This meant the content aligned with a user’s specific needs at that moment in time, but also future-proofed the app to make sure it worked long-term. The team validated this concept by putting a prototype in parent’s hands through several rounds of user testing, before applying a refreshed UI to the app experience.

Working with a tight budget, key requirements for the app included low maintenance cost and rapid development. We used React Native to create one code base for the app, working across both Apple and Android stores. We also built a custom API suite to support Tommy’s content-driven model and integrated it with Adestra and their Drupal platform, which serves primarily as an object translation layer to properly ensure a versioned and stable API contract exists between the native application and its integrations.