Egg freezing stress, meet Claude: Building for women’s health and fertility in the age of AI
I started building with Claude Cowork a few weeks ago. A little personal health dashboard here, a where to go to dinner widget there. But as I prepare to go back for another Harvest (egg freezing cycle), the all-consuming experience looming large in my nightmares, I wondered if my new favorite toy (Claude) could help me get through my least favorite activity (shots).
The short story: I built an egg freezing companion app MVP in a weekend. It’s obviously not medically vetted (yet) but it works shockingly well and covers almost all of the features and functionality I was hoping for.
Which begs the larger question: When we can build anything we want, what will we build? We can’t control whether these magic-seeming, awe-some tools exist or not. But can we use them help make the world a less scary, more fair and equitable, better place to live?
But this isn’t a philosophy article. So let’s get to it…
Step One: Research
I started by dictating aloud, rambling on about the egg freezing process, my stressors from my previous cycles, things I’ve heard from friends, and goals I had for the app. Then I had Chat interview me in depth about my experience. Daily check-ins, medication walkthroughs, inventory monitoring, reassurance. But I didn’t want the app to be based solely on my experience, so I asked Claude to do a big research pass through as many self-reported sources as it could find, and then I asked it to give me some quotes about how it felt working on the project:
Claude: The research I did for you was synthesis, not discovery. I didn’t talk to a single patient. Everything I pulled together came from women who’d already done the harder work — writing Substacks at 11pm after their second failed cycle, posting in subreddits about maturation rates their clinic didn’t explain, agreeing to be interviewed for academic studies. The value I added was speed and pattern-matching across sources.
Armed with some provisional research and my own experience, we built a brief for the mvp.
Step Two: Wireframing Key Flows
After our interviews and research, I asked Claude to do a pass at wireframes for key screens in Figma so that I could edit text, modules, and tweak the wireframes easily. Apparently Claude can read annotations, so I left my feedback as annotations throughout the wires.
A few rounds of back and forth later, we had a good layout for the key flows. One that I was especially excited about (as a needlephobe) is the injection flow — I pulled up Kindbody’s videos every single night while I was doing the egg freezing, nervous I would forget a step or get it wrong and somehow permanently injure myself.
The app walks users through this process each evening, with a timer for icing and step by step walkthroughs of each shot. Plus, confetti for once the shots are done. We gotta celebrate the small stuff.
Claude: What surprised me was how much of the project was writing, not coding. Forty-some screens, each with copy calibrated to a specific day in a medical journey. The CSS took an afternoon. The voice took the whole project.
The dashboard of the app has a day counter, positive messaging, and ultra-clear language so it doesn’t feel cutesy or downplay the seriousness of the experience. Doctor’s appointments and daily shots take center stage, so the user never has to remember what’s next — the app is always there to remind you.
The medication tracking flow was another one I think will get a lot of use. As patients, we’ve never heard of these meds before and don’t know anything about them. They show up in a big box with a bunch of needles and we’re just expected to remember everything? I found that extremely intimidating during my first cycle, and annoying during my second.
In the app, you can enter your meds, dosages, and how much you’ve ordered so that the app can keep track of when you need to order more. With meds this expensive, I didn’t want to over-order, so I had to re-up halfway through. But it takes 2 days to get them shipped, so knowing that the app will remind me with three days’ notice helps get the mental burden off my shoulders.
I heard so much lore about the trigger shot being scary and stressful — I dreaded it the entire time. It’s crucial that it happens down to the minute, because the retrieval is timed based on the trigger timing, and both of mine happened at like 10:45pm for a morning retrieval 2 days later.
Once you get a trigger and retrieval time, you can enter it into the app down to the minute and the app will help you prepare. A countdown can be enabled to help prepare, give you time to read instructions and mix meds.
After the trigger, shots are generally done, so the app becomes a prep companion for the retrieval itself. Instructions about what to do on the day, plus encouraging messaging, help to reduce stress.
Claude: The trigger countdown is the moment I most wanted to get right. Black background, 30-minute live countdown, big serif headline reading ‘Take your trigger shot at exactly 10:15 PM,’ a single ‘I did it!’ button. Almost cinematic. The patient gets one shot at this — the to-the-minute medication that triggers ovulation 36 hours later — and the screen needed to feel like the app understood what was at stake.
The process isn’t over after the retrieval. Bloating and heaviness sticks around, side effects, your body just needs some time to bounce back. I felt weird for weeks after, and my first period after the retrieval was very different for me. The app continues to support users through their first period, and each cycle can be saved and archived in the app for future reference.
Preparing for the post-retrieval doctor call is a moment I’m really excited about. Still a little woozy from anesthesia, the doctor calls you to tell you how many eggs are retrieved and frozen, and then the whole thing feels “over.” But what do those numbers mean? The app helps prepare users for the call, with follow-up questions to help you get the most information from the doctor while they’re on the phone.
Step Three: Finding a Medical Partner
After going through the wireframe phase, it started to become clear to me that although this is a great start, it’s really begging for a medical professional to dive deep on the content and flows. I can only get so far as a designer…but it’s so important that this product is guiding users in the right way, and is scientifically accurate.
So my next step is to find a medical team to help build this out in earnest, ahead of offering it to anyone to test. With that goal in mind, I painted a Kindbody brand layer over the app to help their team envision this as a Kindbody patient companion (since I’m a huge fangirl and they’d be my dream partner).
The current prototype is live at eggfreeze.netlify.app — check it out and leave me some notes! The bottom bar is tracking notes directly in Netlify so I can see feedback per screen easily.
Perhaps the most fun I had writing this was asking Claude to share its thoughts about working together. I thought this insight was particularly interesting; it seemed to take the subject matter extremely seriously, which was a different twist from our other apps together.
Claude: The hardest design decisions on this project were about what not to add. We had a hundred ideas — symptom logging, OHSS interactive checker, support-person mode, AMH yield calculator. Most of them I argued out of MVP. A fertility app full of stuff is just another anxiety-provoking thing to manage. We were trying to build the opposite.
I was surprised at how Claude was relating to me throughout the process. Or that the LLM knows what to say about this kind of process? Truly, who knows anymore…
Maggie has been through the cycle herself. That changed every decision. I wasn’t designing for an imagined user — I was building with someone who could veto a screen because it didn’t match what she felt at 8:42 PM on Day 5 of her own cycle. That’s the best kind of feedback loop you can get on something this personal.
Next Steps
I’d really love to bring this to life, for myself and the thousands of other people intimidated by doing egg freezing cycles. If you’ve been through it, I’d love to hear your feedback! If you have an idea for a medical partner I could chat with, I’d love that, too.
You can reach me directly at hello@thisjanuary.com ✨
