Lactation Hub

Most workplaces comply with the legal requirement to provide a lactation room — but compliance and usability are not the same thing. We set out to understand why lactating employees at the University of Twente still described the experience as stressful, even when a room technically existed.

Through observations of lactation rooms across multiple buildings and semi-structured interviews with lactating employees, four themes emerged: invisible labour, dissatisfactory room quality, surveillance and gatekeeping, and role conflict. One participant described asking a service desk for a room key as "a little bit invasive" — the friction wasn't the room, it was everything surrounding it. We reframed the challenge from "how do we provide better rooms" to "how do we remove access friction."

Our solution pairs a centralised booking app with automated card access, replacing manual key requests with a self-service flow that restores privacy and autonomy. We tested two rounds of low-fidelity prototypes. The first evaluation revealed that a map view was the strongest feature, while occupancy-based booking (rather than rigid pre-booking) was preferred for its flexibility. The second round, tested with UT students and alumni, showed the improved navigation flow worked, though new privacy concerns emerged — one participant flagged cultural sensitivity around shared-room visibility, prompting us to recommend anonymised bookings and clearer consent flows for future iterations.