Ro, a Health Bot by Planned Parenthood

June 2017 - October 2018

Project Details
Amidst the risk of defunding, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) wanted to ensure continued access to it's healthcare knowledge.
This product aimed at providing low-income,
minority teens better access to sexual reproductive health information. 

Via primary and secondary research we discovered that teens not only lack access, but face misinformation.  After testing early concepts, we focused on the gender-neutral chatbot Ro, that answers any free-form or suggested questions a teen may ask regarding their sexual or reproductive health. 

Ro is powered by IBM's Watson Assistant (formerly Watson Conversation). As Work & Co’s first foray into Watson-powered bots, one of the biggest challenges we faced as a team was not only learning the Assistant tool, but architecting conversations within it that would scale as new content was added, and could adapt to new training based on real user inputs.

Outcome
Ro launched in April 2018. As of mid-June of this year, Ro had a 62% success rate. Success is calculated based on a combination of accurately answered as well as inaccurately answered and/or confused responses.

2019 Product Update
Roo (formerly Ro) was re-platformed by Planned Parenthood and Work & Co in November 2018 to accommodate for a stronger Natural Language Understanding and Processing system.

View re-launched Roo
View full process

Role 
In my role as director, I managed a team of 3 designers and led conversation architecture, system documentation, UI design and user research. I also contributed to product strategy.

In the second phase of work, I continued to lead new subject matter training, rearchitecting conversations and bug fixing. Additionally, I ran Watson Assistant training workshops for PPFA, to empower their design team as they transition to long-term internal management of Ro. 

Team

Product Design:
Sojin Ouh, Juliana Gaiba

Illustrations & Motion Design:
Sang Woo Kim

Technology:
Chris Alden, Isabella Silveira, 
Paula Penedo

Product Management:
Jenny Hirsch

Partner:
Casey Sheehan, Gene Liebel

Full experience demo video

Key screens from Ro, including onboarding, menu and the core conversation pane. 

Training document I wrote to onboard the client's product team on how we built Ro. This was critical to their learning and on going management process.

Key document I devised that impact client-side and internal workflows for content, product management and design teams.

4 out of 8 parameters I defined for our clients to begin to analyze Ro's performance.
 

Watson Assistant, the chatbot builder from IBM used to architect Ro. Displayed here are the "Intents" I defined that impacted bot logic. 

Dialog Nodes that structured conversations