In 2024, I started work on the Period Symptom Checker for the charity Wellbeing of Women. This was one of the outputs of the “Just a Period” campaign. You can read about my work on the overall campaign strategy here.
The Period Symptom Checker was built to raise awareness of the treatments available for debilitating period symptoms, whilst empowering women to combat dismissal.
The Period Symptom Checker asks questions about heavy bleeding and period pain, then gives advice. If the user is advised to speak to their GP, they’re even given a personalised letter to take with them to their appointment.
Within eight weeks of launch, the Period Symptom Checker had been used by 16,000 people, and around 20% of them had signed up for ongoing emails from the charity.
This is the story of how it was co-created.
Research and insights
My research for the “Just a Period” campaign overall informed the Period Symptom Checker scope. This included search trend data, menstrual health sector research (looking at existing campaigns and resources), social media listening data, and the results of Wellbeing of Women’s nationally-representative survey. This showed that period pain and heavy bleeding were the two period symptoms most commonly searched, discussed, and experienced by women.
To develop the Period Symptom Checker, I first looked at existing similar tools like Chron’s & Colitis’s Symptom Checker (speaking to their team about their development process and the technology behind it), as well as the NHS’s heavy bleeding self-assessment tool (which has since been decommissioned), and we had discussions with the NHS about their other patient decision making tools (which were mostly PDFs).
I then drew on my own personal patient experiences of being dismissed and the normalisation of pain (I have endometriosis and adenomyosis myself, which took 20 years to diagnose), desk research from the NHS website, NICE guidelines and others.
Minimum Viable Product
I used all of these research sources to create a very basic version (an MVP, Minimum Viable Product) of the Period Symptom Checker in Typeform, with just two or three questions and two possible outcomes (see your GP, or no actions needed). This was used to provide context for how the Checker could work, for the co-design workshop participants.
Co-design workshop
The Wellbeing of Women team then convened a co-design workshop, inviting women with personal experience of menstrual health conditions, GPs, gynaecologists and menstrual health researchers.
In the workshop we gathered needs from all parties, deeply discussing what would be helpful, what would make women feel heard, what information was essential to GPs to streamline their subsequent conversations with patients, and what advice should be given – to inform accurately, without alarming women. This allowed us to capture a broad range of ideas.
Incorporating insights from the workshop
After the workshop, Wellbeing of Women documented all suggestions. I then validated which suggestions were technically possible to implement, and what was viable whilst maintaining a limited scope (to ensure good UX) – to create a list of amendments for the improved version of the Checker.
I drafted the new questions and logic flow, this draft was checked by GPs, then I built it in Typeform.
Testing and final checks
After I’d carried out my own quality assurance checks, it was tested by the Wellbeing of Women team. Then 1:1 video interviews were carried out with GPs for feedback, with Wellbeing of Women taking them through the tool to check that the questions were relevant and the advice was accurate for as many scenarios as we could think of.
After further amends, it was shared again with all the workshop participants as well as with members of the Royal College of GPs.
Launch
The Period Symptom Checker was launched in February 2025, and within eight weeks had been used by 16,000 people. Most of them were urged to speak to their GP.
Ongoing feedback and iteration
On the final advice pages, I added a Hotjar feedback widget to ask for feedback and to ask whether the user plans to visit their GP (on pages where they’d been advised to do so only).
This feedback, and more research methods, will be used to evaluate the tool’s impact, and to inform future development.
Digital product services
If your charity or public service organisation is considering creating a new digital product (app, website, tool, platform etc.), I can help with the research, strategy, planning, co-design process, production and evaluation.
Email me to tell me about your idea or challenge.
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