Cycle

Our Brief

Cycle is an innovative app focused on connecting marginalized communities and young adults to affordable menstrual products, reliable information, and an inclusive safe space. Stigma around menstruation among youth and marginalized communities makes it difficult to have an open conversation on the diverse and vast experiences people have, especially when current menstruation apps are created by men and are geared towards an audience of heterosexual and female-identifying pregnancies.

Cycle innovates a new wave of menstruation app that focuses on the people who experience menstruation - and not their child-bearing abilities.

Inspiration 🧠

Our inspiration was from the existing menstrual-cycle tracking apps. With a feminine-front and motherly design, it made us uncomfortable in that it wasn't inclusive of those that did not identify as female, as well as did not provide enough resources to find affordable period products.

What it does 💻

Our app's main features include:

• Customizable needs that determine your news, insights, etc.
• Discussion forums with reliable resources and specialists
• Customized articles based on a user's preference
• A Menstrual and General Health Tracker
• Coupons/Resources to find affordable sanitary products and environmentally sustainable alternatives

The Logistics & How We Built It

We used Figma to prototype our app, and used React to create a landing page to pitch our design. We used a gatsby.js starter template to get started on the code of our website (credits in our pitch video)!

Our Takeaways

We found that the app was inspired by what we, as consumers, are looking for within an app. Especially with an app relating to menstruation, the current apps do not include all the features we want/need. Our key takeway is we looked at our own demands for inspiration and we have the power to actually produce it! #womeninSTEM

Challenges we ran into 😠

Some challenges we ran into were difficulties in the logistical side of providing affordable period products depending on the location of a user. We hope to expand the coupon idea with Flipp, to search for the cheapest products through various stores, as well as will be providing a location service for womens' shelters and support groups.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 😊

We're proud of being a part of a hackathon that is women-focused. Being a team of all-female engineers pursuing STEM careers, we wanted to create an app that addressed a difficulty many women and marginalized communities (impoverished, LGBTQ+, POC, etc.) have, and the lack of an open conversation around menstruation unless there is a pregnancy undertone. Our goal was to provide a space that normalizes sex, affordable and convenient shopping, and reliable sources for vital health information.

What we learned 📖

We learnt/gained further understanding in Figma Prototyping and Front-End Web Development

Built With

• figma
• gatsby
• github