Se Toca, Mana! · UX Research
Closing a healthcare access gap for LBT women, by co-designing Se Toca, Mana! directly with the women and providers it serves
- UX Research
- Co-Design
- Health Equity
- Academic Research
Context
A platform democratizing access to information on self-awareness, sexuality, and health for diverse women, connecting them with healthcare professionals who understand their lived experience. Originated as an academic research project during the Master's in Design program at CESAR School.
My role
UX Researcher & Designer, responsible for research, co-design, and interface design, within a 5-person academic research group.
Team
5-person academic research group.
Objective
Close a documented gap in non-judgmental healthcare access for LBT women, one that was actively pushing them out of preventive and routine care.
Company & User
The problem
Qualitative research surfaced a significant gap in access to non-judgmental healthcare for LBT women, leading to their absence from preventive and routine healthcare altogether. This isn't a UX inconvenience. It's a documented public health equity issue.
User needs
Women, and LBT women specifically, needed a space that felt safe enough to ask real questions about their bodies without fear of judgment, plus a reliable way to find professionals who already understood their context instead of having to explain it from scratch every visit.
What success looked like
A platform that both women and healthcare professionals could trust, backed by research rigorous enough to secure institutional support (which it did, through an innovation grant from Armazém da Criatividade).
Process
Discovery
Conducted qualitative research and user testing with 6 healthcare professionals and 10 women using both public and private health systems, before designing anything.
Ideation
Used the Value Proposition Canvas, the 635 Brainstorming Method, and an Idea Selection Matrix to generate and evaluate directions, informed by competitor benchmarking.
Prototyping
Built low-fidelity prototypes and wireframes to structure the user journey.
Validation
Ran usability testing with 7 LBT women and 3 healthcare professionals, using their feedback to refine the prototype through incremental iterations, not a single big redesign.
The moment that changed the project
During an active listening session with 12 participants across diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, gender identities, and sexual orientations, several participants shared that the name "Se Toca, Mana" felt exclusionary, particularly toward non-CIS women. The team's response wasn't to defend the original name. It was to rebrand the platform as Diversicuida, a name chosen collectively to reflect the actual diversity of the women it aimed to serve.
Results & Impact
- Received an innovation grant from Armazém da Criatividade, evolving the project from academic prototype into a social enterprise
- Published in Estudos em Design (peer-reviewed design journal): "Plataforma 'Se Toca, Mana!': o processo de Design na investigação das barreiras no exercício do direito à saúde de mulheres LBT"
- Shipped platform features: Home (with specialty, consultation type, and public/private filters), About Us, Specialized Centers and Support Networks directory, Recommended Professionals, and professional self-registration
- Live prototype at setocamana.softr.app
Closure & Relevance
The hardest design decision on this project wasn't a screen. It was accepting that the name I'd helped build wasn't serving the people it was meant for, and rebuilding the platform's identity around what the community actually said, not around what the research team had originally assumed. Diversity isn't a value you put in a mission statement. It's built collaboratively, or it isn't real.
Why this matters for UX Research and equity-conscious roles
This case is the strongest evidence in my portfolio that I treat community feedback as authority, not as input to be filtered through my own assumptions, even when that means undoing my own earlier decisions. It's also proof of research rigor serious enough to secure institutional funding and academic publication, not just internal validation.
Product Management lens
Securing the Armazém da Criatividade grant meant building a credible business case out of qualitative research alone, translating interview findings into a value proposition an institutional funder would back. The rebrand itself was a strategic product pivot, not a cosmetic one: it meant weighing fresh user evidence against the sunk cost of an existing name and brand identity, and choosing to act on the evidence instead of protecting prior work. That trade-off, between preserving what's already built and responding to what users actually say, is a product decision as much as a design one.