Functional Design Requirements to Facilitate Menstrual Health Data Exploration

Menstrual trackers currently lack the affordances required to help individuals achieve their goals beyond menstrual event predictions and symptom logging. Taking an initial step towards this aspiration, we propose, validate, and refine five functional design requirements for future interface designs that facilitate menstrual data exploration. We interviewed 30 individuals who menstruate and collected their feedback on the practical application of these requirements. To elicit ideas and impressions, we designed two proof-of-concept interfaces to use as design probes with similar core functionalities but different presentations of phase timing predictions and signal arrangement. Our analysis revealed participants’ feedback regarding the presentation of predictions for menstrual-related events, the visualization of future signal patterns, personalization abilities for viewing signals relevant to their menstrual experience, the availability of resources to understand the underlying biological connections between signals, and the ability to compare multiple cycles side-by-side with context.