This Capstone project, completed during my Master’s in Design program, paired our four-person design team with an OB-GYN research group at Dell Seton Medical Center at the University of Texas led by Dr. Alison Cahill, who acted as our client.
My team was to devise a human-centered solution to reduce maternal mortality among mothers supported by Medicaid in Central Texas. While the medical research team had approached the problem clinically, we were asked to approach it through a human-centered lens, and be as innovative as possible. Our client said she had time to empirically prove whatever solution we thought best. We were thus allowed a blue sky solution, free of current policy or operational constraints.
I focused on delivering fast, high-impact improvements with minimal development team lift. I interviewed and followed real users through their workflows to uncover practical usability gaps, then translated those insights into new Axure prototypes grounded in our existing design system.
To avoid late-stage surprises, I established regular working sessions with Product Owners, and aligned with them early and often. My pixel-perfect Axure prototypes gave developers absolute clarity, enabling smooth handoff and efficient execution.
One question I’m consistently asked since working on the maternal mortality problem is, “Why do women die after having babies?”
I created this visual framework to communicate our insights and the evolution in our understanding of mortality drivers to external stakeholders and women’s health advocates.
For low-income and immigrant mothers, seeking health can feel like painting a target on one’s own back.
The system thinks in terms of “where to go,” but the patient thinks in terms of “who to trust.”
For Medicaid moms, having someone in your corner means you’re less likely to throw in the towel.
Domestic violence-related deaths increase between 60-365 days postpartum.
Providers communicate on one channel, but patients are tuned to a different channel.
When everyone is responsible for social determinants of health (SDoH), no one is responsible for SDoH.
“Mother as Martyr” societal narrative normalizes mothers’ needs coming last.
For the Medicaid population, the birth of a child can tip existing stressors into full-blown crises.
Based on secondary research and interviews with community partners, we identified four behavioral archetypes that captured the needs and barriers shaping our design.
I led the ideation session that defined the groupings, and I created the women's images with help from AI tools, pulled the quotes, and synthesized the drivers and titles.
Keeping in mind our four archetypes and our goal of creating a “connective tissue” for the postpartum healthcare landscape, we asked ourselves:
How might we strengthen community-based supports to bridge the gap between current missed opportunities in maternal care and mother-centered postpartum care engagement?
We also led an ideation session with our full cohort to expand creative possibilities. We generated dozens of ideas through structured ideation and co-creation, using prompts and mapping tools to spur ideas.
"Housing and childcare.
Those are the hardest things to find, but they can't think about anything else until they have those two."
- Natalie, Doula from Mama Sana
FOUR FAVORITE CONCEPTS
We developed five initial concepts, and I led a concept review and dot-voting session with Dr. Cahill, our client. The pros and cons of mobile resources and neighborhood centers sparked deep discussion, but there was no clear winner. Each had advantages depending on location, safety, and community context.
In the end we saw that each of these concepts addressed distinct needs across our behavioral archetypes, and each had value. We realized they were not really competing but complementary.
As we moved toward a final concept, it became clear Community Health Workers (CHWs) — both highly feasible and high-impact — were a non-negotiable cornerstone of our solution.
Our team debated whether to prioritize neighborhood resource centers or a mobile unit but ultimately concluded that both were essential. The mobile unit will offer visibility and reduce transportation barriers, a critical issue in Central Texas. Neighborhood centers, hyper-localized and tied to Austin's existing Neighborhood Centers, would provide climate-controlled space for group classes, activities, and telehealth or remote case management, ensuring a reliable presence even when full staffing isn’t possible.
The all-in Tiny Home Village generated the most enthusiasm and was described by stakeholders as “truly the coolest” idea. Rather than building a single, centralized neighborhood for single mothers, we modified the design to small clusters of tiny homes on city land adjacent to Neighborhood Centers. This approach keeps moms rooted in their communities while allowing them to easily access services throughout the city.
At this point in the project, we received our Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, leaving us just one month to integrate with the clinical research system, set up scheduling and consent workflows, navigate Spanish translation protocols, and begin participant interviews.
I led our team's research integration, setting stand-ups with the clinical research staff every other day until workflows were fully operational. Within 6 business days, we were ready to recruit.
We scheduled seven interviews, coordinating availability within 48 hours, sending reminders, offering renumeration, and setting up easy remote meetings. Only two participants actually showed up.
In the end, this confirmed our earlier insight: this population is busy surviving. Scheduled interviews, even with compensation, couldn’t overcome the barriers of time, trust, and competing priorities. Truly the best data source on this population is the community partners who have already earned their trust and know their realities, making our CHWs even more essential as eyes and ears on the ground to inform the rest of the services.
The system we designed flexes to meet a wide range of backgrounds, needs, and life circumstances. The Neighborhood Resource Center, Tiny Home Village, Community Health Workers, and Mobile Unit each play a specific role, but together, they form a connective tissue that holds the maternal care ecosystem together.
Our "Community Health Hub" concept shifts the burden of coordination and access off of the mother and onto the system itself. We can meet women where they are instead of asking them to navigate a maze of disconnected services.
Instead of centralized community of tiny homes, the community hub keeps women in their own communities by attaching a small cluster of 4-5 tiny homes to each resource center.
This care model also has potential not only to reduce maternal mortality but also to lower long-term healthcare costs by preventing other maternal health problems, heading off Adverse Childhood Events (ACEs), and improving health outcomes for the next generation.
To bring the Community Health Hub to life in a coherent and sustainable way, we devised a layered rollout. The pieces of this system build on each other to replace fragmentation with continuity.
The Community Health Worker program could be rolled out it 3-4 months, and the Mobile Resource Units could be on the ground in 6-9 months. The augmented Resource Center would serve as home base for the mobile unit and could open to the public for other services within 12 months. Finally, tiny homes communities could be offered within 24 months.
In May 2025, we presented our solution to Dr. Cahill and her research team at Dell Medical Center. Ongoing clinical research funded by the Dell Foundation will aim to prove out the value and feasibility of this new care model. Dr. Cahill’s team is in talks with Dell Foundation about pilot program funding.
I prepared an external-facing summary of this work for distribution to interested maternal health advocates and researchers, including community health partners, patient engagement specialists, and a member of the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative.
My team explored creating an app to help users locate the mobile unit and view its scheduled stops. I developed wireframes so that once the project receives pilot funding, we are ready to conduct usability testing before moving to a high-fidelity prototype.
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Highlights
Through this project, I gained experience in adjusting the timeline of a human-centered research project based on constraints and availability of resources. I also learned about how to choose between several good ideas, and when it’s a valid choice to not choose just one.
In talking to community partners with expertise in making community-based health engagement models actually work, I learned that while some ideals may be compromised in the name of feasibility, others are critical scaffolding on which the entire solution rests. In this context where compromising trust may ensure failure, keeping the population's trust is paramount on practical as well as ethical levels.
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