coms472finalproject-blog
coms472finalproject-blog
Women's Health Apps
6 posts
Design and Discourse: An Analysis and Re-Invention
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coms472finalproject-blog · 6 years ago
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About The Project
SUMMARY OF THE PROPOSAL:
The sole purpose of this blog is to analyze health management applications for women. According to Marissa J. Doshi’s article “Barbies, Goddesses, and Entrepreneurs: Discourses of Gendered Digital Embodiment in Women’s Health Apps” (2018), researchers have begun to question “the behaviours and knowledges prioritized through technology design”. Doshi’s study uses feminist perspectives to decode how women’s health applications conceptualize a healthy female subject, which is the angle I have decided to use for this research creation project. I want to look at the discourse and design of these applications as well as how they commodify their target user. In this research project, I will break down all the ways in which these health applications propagate false ideals of body and health through their design and discourse. I will be doing so through blog posts. I intend to offer a critique as well as a re-invention of the ideologies behind this communication technology and its related practices. I will try to offer options for these health applications to have a more feminist and inclusive approach.
BLOG FORM:
I have decided to conduct separate case studies on three of the most popular applications dedicated to women’s health on the Apple Store. I entered the words “Women Health” in the Apple Store search bar and selected three applications that seemed somewhat different from one another in order to compare the similarities and differences. Each case study will consist of an analysis of the design and discourse of each application.
Finally, you will be able to find a blog post about the re-imagination of some of these apps as well as ideas of creations for the ideal women’s health application. As I don’t have the skills to program and design an application, this will be a detailed prototype of what I believe would be a more inclusive and feminist app for all women.
Here are the entries that you will be able to find on this blog:
CASE STUDY 1: “B-Wom: The Women’s Health Coach”
CASE STUDY 2: “Workout for Women: Fitness App”
CASE STUDY 3: “Female Fitness Women Workout”
THE RE-IMAGINATION: An Inclusive and Feminist Approach to Health Apps for Women
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coms472finalproject-blog · 6 years ago
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Case Study 1 : B-Wom: Women’s Health Coach
B-Wom’s description on the App Store reads “Improve your intimate well-being and quality of life with B-wom, your intimate health coach on your mobile” (App Store, 2019). Although the app is focused on women’s intimate health, I still thought it was relevant to analyze in comparison to the other applications because fitness is often advertised as a way to optimize one’s health and I wanted to see how differently the three apps conceptualize a healthy woman body.
B-Wom begins by asking the user a series of questions to customize the experience. The app’s virtual coach explains that we all have different body types with different needs therefore a minute questionnaire is given to the user in order to personalize the settings of the app. The questionnaire is filled with questions related to the woman’s body type, period cycle, hormones, sex life, etc. Then, the app customizes a plan for the user with exercises and self-care that they can tackle easily.
As I kept exploring the app, it became all the more evident that the main goal behind B-Wom is to provide women a platform with information about their bodies and intimate health as well as personalized trainings and reminders to reach each user’s goals. The home page of the application is called “Routines” and is divided in two sections: ‘Timeline’ and ‘Goals’.
The ‘Timeline’ section offers a variety of reads which belong to different sections such as “Exploration”, “Did you know”, “Curiosity of the day” and “Knowledge”. Each of these reads is labeled with the average time it takes to be read which is convenient. Subjects covered in these sections go from “A breast self-examination for cancer prevention” to “Why is it important to eat a balanced diet?”
The ‘Goals’ section offers diverse options to orient the user towards a customized goal. The four different options offered are “Prolapse Prevention”, “Prevent Urine Leaks”, “Increase Your Sexual Pleasure” and “A Firm Stomach”. All these categories suggest a 4 week plan to follow with a series of 12 exercises to repeat according to the user’s needs.
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Beside the home page titled “Routines”, the app is divided in three other pages “Calendar”, “For You” and “My Coach”. The app’s most unique feature is its personal coach which the users can chat with in order to have an experience all the more personalized. However, there is a limited version and a premium version of the coach. The limited one is ultimately a bot which asks you basic questions and gathers your answers without generating actual interactions. On the other hand, the app does offer the option to interact with real life coaches but it requires annual or bi-annual fees which is less convenient.
Although B-Wom seems to be going way beyond the conception of a healthy body as physically toned and fit, I believe it still participates in the conception of an ideal healthy female subject. In fact, B-Wom guides women of all ages through how to take care of their pelvic era through every stage of life. From young adults and women without children, through pregnancy and postpartum, to Motherhood and Menopause. According to Doshi (2018), “findings show that the ideal healthy female subject embodies the physical traits of a Barbie doll, the fertility and sexual potential of a goddess, and the discipline and dedication of an entrepreneur” (p.184). Therefore, while B-Wom is not advocating for physical traits as ideals of the healthy woman body, it is in a way advocating for “the archetype of the Earth goddess which elevates fertility and sexuality to construct womanhood as divine yet rooted in physical traits” (Doshi, p. 190).
As I was reading more about Doshi’s theory, it became all the more evident how B-Wom participates in the archetype. In her text, she explains that this ideal is “embedded in the descriptions and icons of the apps through centering fertility […] and sexuality” (Doshi, p.190). If we take a moment to look at the name of the app “B-Wom” it can be interpreted in many ways but I personally read two different things. First, I believe it can be read as Be-Woman in the sense that this app helps us, women, in being and monitoring ourselves, our bodies. On the other hand, if we switch around the letters, B-Wom becomes Wom-b. Giving a closer look at the logo of the app in the shape of a “W”, it takes other forms when we move it around. I would argue that upside down it looks like a womb and when we turn it counter clockwise it looks like a pregnant belly. Taking all these design elements into consideration along with the app’s purpose of helping women to take care of their intimate health, “sexual difference is drawn along reproductive lines, with womanhood articulated through fertility” (Doshi, p.190). According to Ulrich & Weatherall (2000), this reductive understanding of womanhood perpetuates stigmatizing discourse of female infertility, which frame infertile women as unnatural. In other words, B-Wom’s conception of the healthy female body is one that is fertile.
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Moreover, as the app’s conceptualization of the ideal healthy female body becomes clearer, I believe it is evident that the app was made for (fertile) cis-women. This fact is obvious as, in the opening questionnaire, the user is asked for ‘her’ age, height and weight but that’s about it in terms of specifications before moving on to questions related to intimate health. Questions related to pregnancy and fertility are also a signifier that trans women are not taken into consideration as there are no questions related to the user’s gender identity or the user’s sex as assigned at birth. Bivens and Haimson (2016) argue that “continuing to bake the binary into sign-up pages, even when gender materializes as a more open category within other parts of the software, suggests that sign-up pages are not designed to serve users” (p.4).
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coms472finalproject-blog · 6 years ago
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Case Study 2 : Workout For Women
Workout For Women is the typical fitness app in the sense that it is focused on workout and weight tracking. In contrast to B-Wom, it does not offer any personalized options to the users. The main premise behind this app is to offer quick workouts to women who are “short on time but want to get healthier” (App Store, 2019).
As for the design of the app and it is really simple to use. Like B-Wom, Workout For Women is divided in three main pages: Workouts, Timeline, Profile.
The workout section is straight forward. Each workout has a self-explanatory title and its description tells us the level of difficulty, the workout time as well as the calories lost while doing it. Once again, the descriptions highlight the premise of the app which is based on time efficiency and calorie tracking. The app offers up to 9 different categories with titles such as “Hot”, “7 Minute”, “Beginner”, “Fat Loss”, “Butt”, “Abs”, “High Intensity”, etc. These categories give a sense of agency to the users and they allow them to choose the kind of workout they want to engage in. Each category offers a variety of workouts such as “Beginner Abs”, “Body Builder”, “Booty Attention”, “Legs Shaper” and “Plank Challenge”. While these workouts all seem to have pretty straight forward and classic titles, a few of them left me bothered such as “Angel Butt”, “Angel Abs” and “Angel Body”. These workout are described as “Victoria’s Secret Angel inspired workout” which emphasize an unrealistic body ideal.
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As stated in Dania Salih’s Bachelor Thesis from Malmö University (2016), a brand like Victoria’s Secret “contributes to creating and naturalizing ideals and values about femininity, which might affect the way its target audience (women) view themselves as women and as individuals” (p.10). Moreover, “feeling that you do not measure up to the ideals set by society can make you disregard your real accomplishments in life, creating a negative self-image and, consequently, making you project yourself in a negative way to the outside world” (Smith, Baish, Willett and Watson, 2013, qtd. in Salih, 2016, p.10). Thus, by promoting this sort of ideals, Workout For Women participates in the creation of unrealistic beauty standards as well as unrealistic ideals of health.
The Profile section is the one in which the user is able to track their weight loss. In fact, it seems like the only information that the users are able to track through this app is their weight loss. I was shocked by the scale that the app presents because the highest possible weight is 160lbs and the lowest is 100lbs. Therefore, this scale automatically excludes people who weight any more or less than the presented scale. In a sense, it seems to be saying that a healthy female body is one that weights between 100 and 160 pounds.
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I believe Workout for Women is an app that falls directly in Doshi’s archetype of the Entrepreneur. Of course, the figure of the hard working woman to achieve success is “uniquely bound up in modern iterations of the American dream (Carland & Carland, 1997, qtd. in Doshi, 2018, p.193). Thus, Doshi explains that women’s health apps often conceptualize the healthy female subject as “one who engages in self-surveillance, disclosure, and self-advocacy” (Timmons & Spinelli, 2004, qtd. in Doshi, 2018, p. 193). In that sense, Workout for Women participates in this archetype by promoting self monitoring through calorie counting and weight tracking. Through the use of this app, the female body becomes an entrepreneurial project which requires constant monitoring and attention in order to achieve success (Doshi, 2018).
Ultimately, Workout for Women conceptualizes the healthy female body as one that is its own health advocate. As stated by Doshi, “entrepreneurs need to advocate for their projects because they are understood to have the most complete knowledge about their projects, and success depends on their abilities to advocate for their projects” (Timmons & Spinelli, 2004, qtd. in Doshi, 2018, p. 194). In other words, Workout for Women envisions the healthy woman as one who takes an entrepreneurial role in her health care by owning knowledge on her body through the disciplined used of the app.
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Case Study 3 : Female Fitness
Female Fitness is very similar to Workout for Women in the sense that it is mostly based on weight tracking and calorie counting. The app’s description on the Apple Store is “Female Fitness helps you burn fat, tone butt, slim legs, trim waistline and get in shape. Train your body, burn calories, lose weight, you will get a sexy body before you know it!” (App Store, 2019). Before even opening the app, I knew it conceptualized the healthy female body as one that is “sexy” and “slim”.
When you first start using the app it asks you a few questions in order to pin point your goal. The first question focuses on selecting a goal between “Lose weight”, “Get stronger” and “Keep fit”. Then it asks which part of the body you want to focus on between your arm, belly, butt and thigh. The very short questionnaire ends with setting a weekly goal which the app suggest to train 3 days a week for better results. This is the most personalization that users are getting from this application.
The app is divided in similar ways as Workout for Women with three main sections: Home, Training and Report. The Home page is basically a summary of the two other pages; it showcases the progression of the user’s weekly goal, the user’s favourite workouts and the app’s weekly trending workouts. However, I decided to focus my design analysis on the two other pages as I found they were more targeted to the user’s personal development through the app.
The Report page is another version of Workout for Women’s Profile page which presents a scale where the users can track their weight loss. The main difference is that Female Fitness allows the user to track more than their weight; it allows them to monitor the amount of workouts completed, calories burned as well as their BMI (Body Mass Index). Thus, Female Fitness also falls in Doshi’s archetype of the healthy female body as Entrepreneur. Moreover, the app has a “Reminder” option which lets the user set weekly or daily reminders to workout which is another characteristic of the Entrepreneur archetype. Doshi explains that “app affordances such as preset reminders about regular check-ins encourage self-surveillance” (2018, p. 193).
On the other hand, the Training page of the app offers a broad variety of workouts which I have found positive and negative aspects to discuss. To begin with the positive elements, each workout is offered in a Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced version and the images chosen to illustrate each of them offer realistic expectations. For instance, the abs workout for beginner shows a woman’s stomach that is not defined and toned compared to the advanced abs workout which shows a clearly defined and fit stomach. This stood out to me because most of the images used on Workout for Women are images of women that are already fit, even in the beginner section.
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That said, I have noticed that ALL the women pictured on this app - and on Workout for Women, looking back - are White women. This exclusion of women of colour not only promotes white women as the ideal female body but it also participates in Doshi’s archetype of the Barbie. Doshi explains that “the preponderance of White women in the icons of apps implies whiteness as the norm for defining health. The women featured are often smiling, White, and slender with blonde or brown hair” (2018, p.189). Moreover, Female Fitness engages all the more in this archetype with its two “Face firming yoga” routines titled “Slim down your face” and “Get rid of double chin”. Both routines showcase White women with perfect, glossy and wrinkle free skin which clearly evoke the archetype of the Barbie.
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I also believe that the BMI scale on the Report page is used as a way to put the user on a colour coded scale which either puts them in the green or the red and therefore shows how close they are to the Barbie ideal. As argued by Schick, Rima and Calabrese (2011), the Barbie Doll ideal is characterized by a low BMI, narrow hips and a prominent bust.
Moreover, the app is advertised as the best way to “get a perfect bikini body” (App Store, 2019). By being promoted this way, the app positions the healthy woman’s body as bikini ready. Doshi argues that the bikini body which is achieve by working out various body parts “perpetuates discourses that see the female body as fragmented rather than a cohesive whole and is antithetical to viewing health in holistic terms” (2018, p.188).
Essentially, Female Fitness, along with Workout for Women, participates in the conceptualization of the healthy female body as one that is self-monitored, bikini ready and barbie like. According to the discourses embodied in this app, women of colour that are not self-monitoring are not a healthy ideal.
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coms472finalproject-blog · 6 years ago
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The Re-Imagination: An Inclusive and Feminist Approach to Health Apps for Women
In the re-imagination of these women’s health application, I wanted to think of a design that would find a solution or at least a common ground to all the negative elements highlighted in my case studies. I wondered what extra steps could be taken to create an app that would be as inclusive as possible to all women no matter their age, body type, race or gender identity.
As mentioned in the aim of this project, Doshi’s study (2018) is a centric element to my analyses as she uses feminist perspectives to decode women’s health applications’ conceptualization of a healthy female subject. Therefore, my re-imagination will be divided following the three archetypes as defined by Doshi: the Earth goddess, the Barbie and the Entrepreneur. Within these three categories will be listed all the elements that stood out as non-inclusive or non-feminist along with their re-invention.
As we have seen on B-Wom, the app embodies the healthy female subject as the Earth goddess archetype by highlighting the woman’s fertility and sexuality. However, not all women are cis-women, fertile or sexually active. In that sense, I think the re-invention of the app should present a sign-up page with questions that cover these grey zones so that the app can then offer personalized content to each user without assuming that any of these characteristics are intrinsic to all women. As stated by Bivens and Haimson, “for users with complex gender identities, underlying sociotechnical infrastructures can constrain choices” (2016, p.4). While we are talking about an app for Women and often there are no gender fields in the sign up section, the assumption that all users are cis-women emphasizes the categorization schema that erases everyone who does not fit the binary. Thus, I believe the users should at least have the choice to personalize the app according to their own identity.
As for the Barbie archetype, it is deeply rooted in the images and language used on these apps. While this might seem like an easy re-imagination, to me it is common sense that this re-invented application showcases diverse women with different body type, age and race, as there is not one definition or embodiment of a healthy female body. When I think of a brand that has managed to create and curate an inclusive and intersectional image of women, I think of Aerie. The company’s campaign #AerieREAL “aspires to promote body positivity through the use of unretouched images - typically, featuring models of different racial backgrounds and in a variety of body types” (Pearl, 2018). The brand also decided to partner with models with disabilities and other medical issues as part of their campaign.
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I strongly believe that this is the kind of image that an application meant to promote women’s health and fitness should have. As explained by Doshi (2018), the unrealistic body types showcased on these apps not only become aspirational but also ensure that health is an always unfinished project.
In that vein, there should be no language that makes reference to unrealistic ideals such as Workout for Women’s Victoria’s Secret Angels workout. Along with the personalization of the sign-up page and the inclusive images of the app, I would focus on language that emphasizes the user’s personal self-care. Aerie’s tag line “Your real power is YOU” is a good example of what I am talking about as it highlights the audience’s inner strength and not an unattainable strength.
Finally, in order to tackle the Entrepreneur archetype, we have to make changes in the monitoring elements of these health applications. Although health apps are mainly used to monitor information about our bodies, “these behaviors are an extension of the type of bodywork regimens in which women have long engaged in order to achieve bodies idealized by prevailing sociocultural norms” (MacNevin, 2003, qtd. in Doshi, 2016, p.197). My re-invented application would not allow calorie or weight tracking. It would be focused the user’s experience. Therefore, it would ask the users if they enjoyed their workout and it would allow them to note how they feel physically after exercising. Therefore, the users would be able to track their physical evolution through how they experience the workouts through time. There would be no scale, no weight, no calorie, just ratings of how tired or how good the user feels after exercising. This way, each user will be able to have an idea of how their bodies adapt to each workout which will give them an idea of how they are improving physically, without linking these results to beauty sociocultural beauty standards.
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coms472finalproject-blog · 6 years ago
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Works Cited
App Store. (2019). B-Wom - The Women’s Health Coach. Retrieved from https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/b-wom-the-womens-health-coach/id926908556?mt=8 
App Store. (2019). Female Fitness - Women Workout. Retrieved from https://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/female-fitness-women-workout/id1357527742?mt=8 
App Store. (2019). Workout for Women: Fitness App. Retrieved from https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/workout-for-women-fitness-app/id839285684?mt=8 
Bivens, R., & Haimson, O. L. (2016). Baking Gender Into Social Media Design: How Platforms Shape Categories for Users and Advertisers. Social Media + Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116672486 
Doshi, M. J. (2018). Barbies, Goddesses, and Entrepreneurs: Discourses of Gendered Digital Embodiment in Women’s Health Apps. Women's Studies in Communication, 41(2), 183-203. 
Pearl, D. (2018, July 12). Aerie Continues Its ‘Real’ Streak, Casting Models With Illnesses and Disabilities. Retrieved from https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/aerie-continues-its-real-streak-casting-models-with-illnesses-and-disabilities/ 
Salih, D. (2016). Brand Image and Self Image: A study on the semiotics behind Victoria’s Secret’s visual communication and its impact on its target audience. 
Schick, V. R., Rima, B. N., & Calabrese, S. K. (2011). E vulva lution: The portrayal of women's external genitalia and physique across time and the current Barbie doll ideals. Journal of sex research, 48(1), 74-81. 
Ulrich, M., & Weatherall, A. (2000). Motherhood and infertility: Viewing motherhood through the lens of infertility. Feminism & Psychology, 10(3), 323-336.
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