Bloom Lab Studio on Giving PCOS a Voice Through Thoughtful Design

Winning the MUSE Design Awards is both a milestone of validation and a platform for growth. It affirms that our commitment to user-centered, inclusive design resonates beyond our team.

At the same time, it renews our motivation — not merely to win awards, but to continue advancing the project so that people living with PCOS can feel seen, supported, and less alone.

Since being announced as winners, we’ve experienced several positive outcomes. Internally, our morale soared as we found new confidence in how our collaboration and process could create real impact.

Externally, we’ve had opportunities to connect with other award-winning designers, listen to their stories, and even receive client inquiries interested in research collaboration. This recognition has already opened new doors for our next project.

We often say that the design process is never linear — it’s a continuous cycle of moving forward, revisiting, and reframing.

At the beginning of our PCOS project, we explored multiple directions — from menstrual tracking to nutrition, exercise, emotional well-being, and even social or expert consultation features. However, the scope quickly became too broad. To stay focused, we conducted user testing with seven participants to understand which features truly mattered to them.

Eventually, we narrowed our focus to the three areas users resonated with most — where they felt seen and understood. Because our product is not a medical app, our goal was to create an experience that offered emotional care and empathy rather than clinical precision.

We translated medical data into warm, seasonal metaphors that reflected the body’s natural rhythms — turning numbers into something poetic, comforting, and deeply human.

The inspiration behind the seasonal metaphor came from an illustrated article about women’s physiology that we once came across online. It described how different menstrual phases — from ovulation to the luteal stage — mirror the four seasons in nature, each with its own rhythm and energy. We were deeply moved by that poetic perspective, as it helped us discover a more human way to visualize biological data.

This gentle metaphor ultimately became the emotional core of Novera.

We wish more people understood that design isn’t a single “aha” moment — it’s a journey of iteration, research, and refinement. It’s not only about making things beautiful; it’s about understanding people, testing assumptions, and evolving solutions.

What looks seamless on the surface is usually the result of countless invisible iterations behind the scenes.

We believe not every client expectation should be met literally. In reality, design always involves constraints — time, budget, and technical resources. To avoid rework later, we invest heavily in early-stage research. Through analyzing existing health apps, we realized PCOS remains an underserved area in digital healthcare.

From there, we identified key needs, prioritized them based on feasibility, and combined our design expertise to make deliberate trade-offs that would deliver the most meaningful outcome.

One major challenge was time pressure — the project had to be completed within eight weeks, which limited our prototyping scope. Another was multi-platform design with limited resources.

We overcame these by focusing on the minimum lovable experience, using rapid prototyping to validate key interactions early, and holding daily stand-ups to stay aligned.

This rhythm allowed us to deliver a polished, thoughtful experience without compromising our design principles.

Each of us has a unique way to recharge.

Yue loves taking long walks — even something as simple as a poster in a coffee shop can spark an idea for her.

Yuling usually recharges by being active outdoors — she loves a good pickup soccer game or a nice rally on the badminton court.

Yutong finds creativity through climbing. Reading each route, planning the best way to the top, and adjusting along the way help her think outside the box. Like climbing, design is about solving problems with focus and curiosity — and enjoying the process just as much as the result.

Ruijie recharges by stepping away from screens and paying attention to the small details of the world around her — the rhythm of a train ride, the colors on a city wall, or the way sunlight shifts across a room. She often sketches or journals these observations, and they quietly evolve into new design ideas later on.

As a team, we believe creativity grows from staying observant — finding inspiration in ordinary moments and daily interactions.

We share three core values: empathy, inclusivity, and clarity.

Empathy — understanding the user’s emotional world.
Inclusivity — designing for diversity across gender, identity, and access.
Clarity — creating simplicity without losing warmth.

For example, Yue’s experience collaborating with NGOs and her background in philosophy have given her a deep sensitivity to inclusive language and the emotions it conveys.

Yutong designs from personal experience. She’s been through times when her own period pain was brushed off, and she noticed how people with PCOS face similar dismissal. Those moments made her care deeply about designing for understanding.

With a background in language studies, Ruijie sees design as a form of translation — turning complex systems and ideas into experiences people can intuitively understand. She values empathy and clarity not only in what a product does, but also in how it speaks to people — building trust through every detail of tone and interaction.

Together, these experiences allow our designs to feel both intelligent and deeply human.

Stay curious, remain humble, and build resilience.

Curiosity will drive you to explore beyond design textbooks, humility will keep you open to feedback and learning, and resilience will carry you through the inevitable projects that don’t go your way.

Finally, build a body of work that shows process, not just outcome — clients and award juries look at how you think, not only how it looks.

If we could collaborate with one designer, it would be Frank Bach, Lead Product Designer at Headspace.

His work beautifully bridges mental health and digital design, turning complex emotional experiences into interfaces that feel calm, empathetic, and human.
We deeply admire how he integrates mindfulness principles into every visual and interaction detail — helping users slow down and connect with themselves through design.

Collaborating with him would be a chance to learn how to craft experiences that don’t just solve problems, but soothe, guide, and heal — values that are at the heart of our ow

We wish people would ask, “What did you leave out?” instead of “What did you include?” because the most meaningful design decisions are often about what not to do — removing distractions, reducing steps, and questioning what truly matters.

We always aim to create focus, not fullness; clarity, not complexity. That intentional subtraction allows users — not the interface — to take center stage.