It's About Bloody Time

Shed Red - It's About Bloody Time

It’s About Bloody Time is a mission-driven card game that seeks to ignite conversations surrounding menstrual health. The pack features three distinct levels of questions and wildcards that allow you to advance your knowledge of period poverty and uncover shared experiences.

It's About Bloody Time - PRD

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About Shed Red

Shed Red is a non-profit organization with a mission to address period poverty in Canada, destigmatize menstruation, and inspire agents of change.  Over the past year, we’ve launched our Red Talks initiative: comprehensive, 45 minute community-based lectures regarding period poverty delivered to high school students in Ontario and British Columbia. To date, we’ve educated 150+ students (both males and females), dispelling the stigma surrounding menstruation and encouraging allyship. 

In our conversations with students, we discovered that many were reluctant to share their experiences related to periods in a classroom setting, and felt embarrassed to engage in open dialogue about menstrual health. Through this card game, It’s About Bloody Time, our mission is to kickstart meaningful conversations about menstruation and educate our generation about period poverty through a Canadian lens.

Problem Alignment 

To address the problem at hand, we first understood the pain points our users face. After interacting with numerous high school students from grades 9 to 11, we discovered that the initial conversation starter served as the key roadblock. In other words, if one member of the group mustered the courage to speak up and share their experiences, others followed suit. This insight allowed us to focus on solving the following question: how can we make the process of initiating menstruation-related conversations as frictionless as possible?

In this discovery stage, a secondary issue was brought to our attention by educators. They lacked engaging and interactive resources to teach students about menstruation and issues related to it. As such, the scope of our project evolved into the following:

1. Destigmatizing Menstruation: Finding a solution to empower students to engage in conversations surrounding this topic.
2. Providing Education Surrounding the Realities of Menstruation: Finding a solution that provides students the Canadian context of adjacent topics to menstruation (i.e. period poverty).

Users

We segmented out user base into two distinct groups:

1. Primary Users: Students in grades 9 to 11 who are uncomfortable having conversations surrounding menstruation

2. Secondary Users: Socially-conscious individuals who are interested in learning more about the subject
   

Goals

1. Improve the education experience surrounding menstruation to reduce feelings of embarrassment and shame
2. Empower users to share their personal experiences to promote peer-to-peer learning
3. Equip users with a holistic understanding of menstruation (i.e. not just about the monthly cycle itself, but related topics including period poverty, environmental implications, etc.)

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Non-Goals 

This game is not intended to do the following:

1. Explain the biological process of menstruation to users
2. Be a stand-alone educational tool, as the conversation does not stop after playing this card game

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Solution Alignment 

User Flow 

Each deck consists of 52 carefully crafted questions to foster a deeper understanding about menstrual health and period poverty in Canada. There are three distinct levels: awareness, reflection, and allyship, in addition to fact-based cards which function as “wildcards”. 

Level 1 (Awareness): This level encourages users to share their personal experiences as it relates to menstruation.

Level 2 (Reflection): This level spotlights how social stigmas have impacted the user’s experience as a menstruator.

Level 3 (Allyship): This level is split into two sections: For Menstruators and For Allies

• The ‘For Mensturators’ section is about identifying allies in the user’s personal life and understanding which techniques have been effective in providing support.
• The ‘For Allies’ section enables non-menstruators to reflect on how they can be better champions for their peers. Only non-menstruators are to select a card from this pile. 
  

Fact-Based Cards (Wild Cards): Fact-based cards provide an opportunity for individuals to learn an interesting statistic related to period poverty, access to menstrual hygiene products, social stigmas, and more. 

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Level System

Each level of the card game delves a layer deeper into the conversation about periods. Since educators function as gatekeepers (wielding the authority to actually purchase the game), it was important for us to ensure that each level required different degrees of thinking. We used Bloom’s Taxonomy—an educational framework that categorizes the cognitive domain of learning into varying levels according to complexity and richness—when designing the game. As you travel up the pyramid, the level of complexity increases. 

With this in mind, we mapped each of the game’s levels to a unique tier of thinking, ensuring we have a well-rounded learning experience and strengthening the game’s value proposition in the eyes of educators:

Execution

Iteration 1 

We began by brainstorming an individual's experiences related to menstruation in both their public and private spheres, which ultimately helped us in creating the prompting questions. Here’s a small excerpt from our brainstorming session:

Our initial wireframes were made with pen and paper, as shown below:

We then built the high fidelity wireframes using Figma, which can be found here. This was our first time using Figma to build something from scratch, and we learned a lot about the tool in the process.

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Iteration 2 

After creating the high fidelity mockups, we conducted user testing with students and educators to obtain valuable feedback:

Findings from User Sessions with Students 
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1. Learned that the prompting conversations should be open-response - You’ll notice that in the User Flow diagram (found under the Key Flows section), there are durations next to each card. These figures denote the average time spent on the specific question based on our testing in groups of 5. Cards with durations under 2 minutes are identified in red, and oftentimes, took the form of simple yes/no questions that didn’t actually spur conversation. As such, one of our key learnings from the testing was to replace close-ended questions with why/how questions that are more conducive to discussion and debate.
2. ‍Learned that the tone of the questions should be conversational - Another key learning from our testing with high school students was to make the language of the card game more conversational and casual. As a result, we removed technical jargon related to menstruation and instead opted for every-day lingo.

Findings from User Sessions with Educators 

1. ‍Learned that the game needed to align with the objectives of the Ontario Curriculum - Teachers wanted an educational resource that makes direct connections to the curriculum taught in schools. Consequently, we conducted extensive research and created this document which specifically addresses how our card game adheres to the standards set out by the Ministry of Education.‍
2. Learned that the game needed to make an intentional effort to be inclusive - In our conversions with educators, we discovered the importance of being inclusive in our terminology and approach. We reworked questions to avoid gender-identifiers and instead used the terms “menstruator” and “non-mensturator”. We also created card specifically for allies to include everyone in the conversation.
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Go-To-Market Strategy

We decided it would be strategic to leverage Shed Red’s strong Instagram following (600+ individuals) to promote our card game. The game retails for $20/per deck and proceeds will go towards a local women's shelter. In order to generate demand, we employed two strategies:

1. Direct-to-Consumer Efforts

On the D2C front, we pushed content on our Instagram in the form of Posts and Instagram Reels:

2. Reaching out to Educators

In order to get the product in schools, we connected with Health and Physical Education Program Coordinators from the Toronto District School Board, Peel District School Board, and Thames Valley District School Board. By providing educators with a lesson plan and demo video outlining how to effectively use the game in classrooms, we equipped them with the resources needed to make an informed purchasing decision.

Future Considerations

Through having discussions with educators, we identified that there is potential to adapt this game for a younger audience, as menstruation is introduced in the curriculum as early as grade 5. Moving beyond a physical product could also help increase accessibility to users, through integrations on the web. By creating an interactive, web-based card game, users would have the flexibility to play the game without any limitations.