Menstrupedia [2] was made as an intersection between technology and Menstrual Health Education (MHE), a taboo across the country. The research paper's central idea is the analysis and summary of this interactional platform's usage and evaluated with the Feminist HCI lens [1] and qualitative research. I find this field very interesting, primarily because everyone considers health to be of their prime concern, but it is often hushed when it comes to menstrual health. Any research that contributes towards reducing this taboo and empowers women has a lot of potential. Not much work has been done in this domain in India, making the resultant work and insights of the current level of MHE, along with suggestions for future work novel and essential for the country.
Usage of the Feminist HCI lens is justified by the topic of the research work itself. Women have historically been the most significant stakeholders in Feminism and all its implications. Menstruation too primarily affects females. Since Feminist HCI is about including the minorities, using this lens adds value to the project. Not only do women need education regarding their reproductive and menstrual health, but the men in their families and friends too need to be educated about something that is a part of everyday life and indirectly affects them. The previous statement is exemplified by some questions that people asked on the Menstrupedia forum. The research methodology followed for the paper was a thematic analysis of the data collected on the website form and interviews conducted. Thematic analysis is an excellent choice for qualitative research since it helps put together all data, which can be used wherever required.
The paper describes the usage of the six qualities of pluralism, ecology, participation, advocacy, embodiment, and self-disclosure. In particular, the paper reflected pluralism in maximizing online and offline engagement and audience with the well-defined target stakeholders of India's technically-enabled middle-class adults. The selection of the platform and its features was well thought. However, to engage more people, another feature can be connecting people to gynecologists. Most females in India do not have access to menstrual health care. Online services or connections can increase MHE in the country. Ecology affected the shaping of the storyline in the comic. However, as one of the user evaluation participants pointed out, interaction with male characters would have added value to the comic. The online forum on the website was based on participation and user involvement. However, as suggested by user evaluation, there were places where the platform lacked. An alternate research method to make the product can be co-design with users. The users would give their opinions while simultaneously working on the platform before it was launched, after which changes can be expensive. Advocacy was projected in the comic where a doctors' character imparted relevant education. However, it can be explored further by comforting users by emphasizing the legitimacy of Menstrupedia. A sense of embodiment was achieved by working on the comfort of participants. Care was taken to ensure that they were open to the idea of getting educated and what would enable them to do the same. Lastly, as explained in the framework, the design should make itself visible to the users what it expects and how it affects them under self-disclosure. The website's goals are evident and straightforward but will require changes if the target audience is expanded, in which case the results may not be replicated.
The work done can be extended in various ways. One of them is working on qualitative research feedback received from the current study to make the existing platform better suited for the audience. Other than that, since the motive of Menstrupedia was to spread MHE, one can extend it to social media, which is gaining a lot of popularity, and almost everyone with smartphone access has access to some of the other forms of social media. A study can be conducted to calculate its impact, giving it both a qualitative and quantitative edge with an exponentially wider target audience.
References
Shaowen Bardzell. 2010. Feminist HCI: taking stock and outlining an agenda for design. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1301–1310. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753521
Anupriya Tuli, Shaan Chopra, Neha Kumar, and Pushpendra Singh. 2018. Learning from and with Menstrupedia: Towards Menstrual Health Education in India. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 2, CSCW: 174:1–174:20. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274443