The Right Time: Your Birth Control, Your Way

About this project

In 2018, Power to Decide, the campaign to prevent unplanned pregnancy (PTD) was awarded a contract to help organize and launch an educational website providing reliable contraceptive information for middle to lower-income Missouri residents. The Right Time was funded and led by the  Missouri Family Health Council (MFHC), an initiative of Missouri Foundation for Health. The funders believe that everyone should have the opportunity to take control of their own health by easily accessing information about, and removing barriers to, contraceptive services.

Interactive Knowledge was chosen to design and develop the new site that provides users with current topics of information about birth control types, side effects, costs, and efficacy. The material is presented in factual and friendly tones through articles written by health care providers, myth-busting animated videos, and real user testimonials. The Right Time website contains a powerful search engine that allows users to search for health centers nearest to them, thus encouraging users to seek in-person visits to find the method of birth control that fits their lifestyle. These clinics offer the full range of birth control methods free or at a reduced cost to those who need it.

The IK approach

Content Administrator Friendly

The new site is built using the latest version of Drupal using a decoupled approach. We wrote thorough documentation and provided user training to the client on the site’s back-end administrative tools, allowing them to update and edit the site in the future. Interactive Knowledge hosts this website and provides training, support, and upgrades as requested.

Template Based Development

Using the Drupal Paragraphs module, many pages are dynamically created by organizing a series of content features, callouts, and media. Continuously migrated content is mixed with custom, curated content specific to The Right Time.

Custom Search Engine

A robust health center finder that delivers results specific to Missouri in both a custom list view and map view. The Right Time clinics, a focus of the initiative, are highlighted throughout the results.

System Integration

Much of the content for The Right Time was migrated from another Power to Decide contraceptive information website, besider.org. We collaborated with the PTD team to create an overall content strategy that provided valuable, trust-worthy contraceptive information to Missouri users, while carefully curating appropriate content based upon the funder’s initiative goals. The design of the site was targeted to a primarily female audience and features empathetic diverse imagery, feminine color scheme and easy to use navigation. Because the majority of targeted users of The Right Time would access the information via mobile devices, we took a “mobile-first” approach to the design, creating a fully responsive, mobile-centric site optimized for smartphones, tablets and laptops.

User Testing

To continue the “mobile-first” approach, we collaborated with the PTD team to conduct Moderated Usability Testing on a mobile prototype. Users were given a set of tasks to perform to measure navigation, content discovery, initiative understanding, and overall relatability. The findings from user testing helped us identify gaps in content and functionality that ultimately drove final development.

The Results

The Right Time, has been used by thousands of women to find up-to-date and accurate information about contraceptives. Originally developed to be only a three year project, the success of the site prompted the Funders to extend the grant to include another three years allowing Power to Decide to continually provide support and new content.

To see The Right Time website and learn more about contraception, please visit therighttime.org.