The reframe step of the human-centered design process consists of highlighting measures of success, defining design goals, and narrowing our How Can We (HCW) statement. This design step is crucial to understanding exactly what we want to achieve from this project, ensuring all decisions we make are motivated by the valuable user insights collected.

At the reframe OS, we focused on brainstorming various HCW statements driven from user insights identified below:

• 80% of our survey respondents menstruate monthly, and 67.2% can typically anticipate when their periods will start.
• 35.1% of respondents budget for purchasing menstrual products.
• “I would rather buy my own products then use poor quality free products” – Interview Quote
• Users typically don’t feel like they should take multiple products, but our interviewee who said she feels financially burdened said she would take multiple, “everyone needs more than one.”

We ended up writing out various HCW statements, which we were able to cluster into one of the following overarching issues: tackling stigma, raising awareness, improving long term accessibility, and educating on financial responsibility. In order to pick one specific HCW statement to drive future design steps, we used a feasibility vs boldness/impact chart (shown below) to assess each statement. Through this chart, we were able to visualize connections/overlap between the different statements. For example, we recognized how stigma against taking multiple free products may influence how the sustainability of a solution would be perceived. Users would not view a solution as long term if they are not empowered to take multiple free products in the first place.

The final HCW we decided on after discussing all of them thoroughly is “HCW provide a long-term supply of high quality menstrual products to those who need it on Rice’s campus?” This statement provides enough direction for our project, since we are now able to narrow our user persona to The Long-Term User, while giving us flexibility to address other influential aspects of the problem space.
Measures of Success consists of short term and long term ways of quantifying the success/limitation of our solution. Two short terms measures of success we identified are a) Finding one stakeholder that is willing to implement our solution and b) tracking the number of free menstrual products taken from resources on campus, with the aim of seeing an increase after the implementation of our solution. A long term measure of success involves surveying users, with the aim of gaining insight into changes in stigma/awareness.
We believe, as design goals, our solution should:

• Be accessible to any user, because The Long-term User tends to be hidden.
• Be self-sustaining or nonburdensome to implement
• Be intuitive to users, thus increasing the easy of use of the solution

Since we have many stakeholders and various possible definitions of accessibility, a lack of specific goals, measures of success, and definition of the problem space would leave us aimless for the rest of the semester. Reframe was successful in facilitating critical analysis of our goals for the rest of the semester, ensuring we have a specified target subspace within the overall problem space.