Part I: The Context
Why must I endure a monthly punishment for being a woman? Must my body endure excruciating pain for a choice I never had agency over? Will the pain and emotions ever dissipate?
These questions have plagued me since the age of 12, the year I started becoming angry at the idea of being a woman. I hated how, once a month, my body would become weak, my emotions would feel uncontrollable, and my whole body would hurt, yet I was still expected to function normally and do everything as if nothing was wrong. For years, I quietly carried the burden of not talking about the pain I was going through because I thought that being a woman meant shutting my mouth and keeping quiet. It meant tears shed in bathroom stalls, forced quiet sobs, and secretly hiding a hot compress inside my clothes while bleeding through layers of clothing.
Reproductive health was a taboo topic, especially if you grew up in a conservative culture. What happens inside a woman’s body during menstruation can be a mystery because the different phases of the menstrual cycle are rarely discussed, especially what our bodies go through during each phase. Our emotions are often labelled simply as “moody,” with little explanation of what might actually be happening in our bodies. As I grew older, I became increasingly saddened by the lack of information about my own body. This lack of understanding pushed me to start looking for answers on my own. I began my own research and started advocating for myself: I went to doctors to get tested, tracked my period, and learned what happens in my body during each phase of the cycle. Finally, after years of thinking I was going crazy every time I was on my period, I began to find answers.
According to Nwadike (2019), “Premenstrual syndrome (PMS) can cause mood swings about a week before your period. You might wake up in great spirits but become irritable an hour or two later for no reason. This is likely related to hormonal fluctuations.” Tracking my period became a way for me to be proactive and prepare for the changes my body was going through as I moved through different phases of my menstrual cycle. More importantly, it gave me a way to recognize patterns in my body instead of simply feeling like something was wrong with me.
However, access to information about menstruation was not always as it is today. Rae Gillibrand, a lecturer at the University of Leeds, explains, “Unfortunately, discussions of menstruation have continued to reinforce shame around the issue through the 20th and 21st centuries, portraying periods as something to be embarrassed about and to be kept hidden.” For a long time, this lack of open discussion also shaped how women were able to understand and track their own bodies. Before the development of modern digital tools, menstrual tracking heavily relied on the calendar method. The calendar method is often used to help plan or avoid pregnancy, but it does not necessarily educate women about what is happening inside their bodies.
Even with the evolution of digital period trackers, however, having access to a tracking tool did not necessarily translate into greater menstrual education. A period tracker can tell you when your period is expected to arrive, but knowing a date is not the same as understanding your body. This distinction is where my interest in menstrual health design began. What if menstrual tracking could move beyond predicting when a woman might bleed and instead help her understand what her body is communicating?
One emerging digital tool in women’s health is the Clue app, a menstrual tracking application designed to not only track the dates of your period, but also your bodily symptoms, emotional shifts, sexual activity, and what happens in your body as you move through each phase of the menstrual cycle: menstrual, follicular, ovulatory, and luteal.
Clue’s design relies on user-generated data (data entered by users), predictive modelling (patterns it detects in your symptoms), and scientific explanations (real-time information based on its predictions of which phase of the cycle you’re in). BioWink GmbH, a Berlin-based company established in 2013, developed it. Rather than functioning as a single instructional material, Clue represents a broader design system. This is because it assumes that women’s bodies are complex and dynamic; menstruation does not happen uniformly, but rather occurs in ways that are shaped by individual biological patterns and environmental experiences.
This approach also reflects a shift away from the one-size-fits-all models that came before it. Historically, menstrual tracking often relied on assumptions that cycles followed predictable patterns. However, cycles are not uniform in length, and ovulation dates can change over time. As Ida Tin, the founder of Clue, developed her ideas, she recognized that most period-tracking tools at the time were paper-based and primarily focused on women’s fertility and pregnancy plans.
Clue emerged alongside the rise of FemTech, a field of digital health technology focused on women’s health and well-being. Rather than viewing menstruation only through the lens of reproduction, FemTech opened space for women to learn about their bodies as part of their overall health. This shift from tracking the body for the purpose of baby-making to understanding the body for meaning-making is what makes Clue an interesting design case.
Acknowledgement
This article was originally written for the class Practitioner Research: Instructional Design Cases under the guidance of Dr. Craig Howard at International Christian University and has since been revised for publication.
References
Gillibrand, R. (2023, August 22). ‘Dirty red’: how periods have been stigmatized through history to the modern day. The Conversation. Retrieved October 6, 2026, from https://theconversation.com/dirty-red-how-periods-have-been-stigmatized-through-history-to-the-modern-day-206967
Nwadike, V. R. (2019, March 8). PMS Mood Swings: Why They Happen, Treatments, and Finding Support. Healthline. Retrieved October 6, 2026, from https://www.healthline.com/health/pms-mood-swings