Not Alone: Designing for Self-Disclosure and Social Support Exchange After Pregnancy Loss.

Pregnancy loss is a common complication in pregnancy. Yet those who experience it can find it challenging to disclose this loss and feelings associated with it, and to seek support for psychological and physical recovery. We describe our process for interleaving interviews, theoretical development, speculative design, and prototyping Not Alone to explore the design space for online disclosures and support seeking in the pregnancy loss context. Interviews with 27 women who had experienced pregnancy loss resulted in theoretical concepts such as "network-level reciprocal disclosure" (NLRD). In this paper, we focus on how interview findings informed the design of the Not Alone prototype, a mobile application aimed at enabling disclosure and social support exchange among those with pregnancy loss experience. The Not Alone prototype embodies concepts that facilitate NLRD: perceptions of homophily, anonymity levels, and self-disclosure by talking about one's experience and engaging with others' disclosures. In future work, we will use Not Alone as a technology probe for exploring and evaluating NLRD as a design principle.