Oky’s principles
Girl-led design
Oky was designed with and for girls, using girl-centred design and extensive research with girls and their close social circles, including boys, in Mongolia and Indonesia. Girls were the decision makers at every stage: they decided Oky’s look and feel, its functionality and features, and its name.
Involving girls at every step of the design and development process ensures Oky’s relevance for girls.
Gamified approach
Oky is girl-centered and engaging, and uses a gamified approach to make learning fun and period tracking discreet.
Through Oky’s gamified design, users can personalize the app, select and unlock their own avatars and themes, play quizzes and get messages from their avatar!
Oky uses period and body-positive language, to remove stigma and add some fun!
Designed for girls’ digital realities
Girl-centred research helped us understand girls’ digital experiences and habits. Many girls share phones, or live in places where there is little network, or have low end smartphones.
Oky has been tailored for these digital realities. The app is lightweight for lower end phones. It works offline without an internet connection. It allows different users to log in on the same phone, and offers strong security and passcode protection. It is localized to girls’ context and language.
Evidence-based content
Oky provides evidence-based information about menstruation, puberty, and reproductive health in girl-friendly language, which has been created and vetted by experts. All content is aligned to international standards of sexuality education.
Oky also has referral information directing girls to online and offline advice and services, in case they need support.
Open source
Oky’s code and content is open source.
Anyone can utilize the code or content with no development or licensing costs. Being open source allows continuous co-creation and iteration of the Oky app, and the opportunity to build a truly global Oky community.
The Oky source code is publicly available on GitHub. Anyone can access the white-labelled code and use it under the AGPL-3.0 License. You can search for ‘period tracker app’ on GitHub or use this link to access the code.
The content is available upon request.
Accessible and inclusive
Oky has also been designed with and for girls with disabilities, involving through consultations.
It has been tested using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines to ensure it is reaching the widest audience possible, and partners receive expert guidance and technical support on best disability inclusion and accessibility practices.
Private and secure
With Oky, privacy comes first.
Oky does not capture any personally identifiable data, because it can provide its valuable services to girls and young women without it. This means Oky never asks a girl for her name or her email address, or any other personal identifier when she uses the Oky app. She can interact with Oky and none of her entries make her identifiable.
Oky is a password protected app and each user has their own password. A user can download Oky and then use it offline. Her account and data stays in her app and is not saved anywhere else. When a girl registers an account and uses Oky online, she makes up a random username, password, and answer to a secret question. These fictitious inputs are not able to identify her even in plain text, as part of Oky’s strict data governance approach.
Even when a girl uses Oky online, Oky stores most data she enters locally in the app and minimizes what is saved on a secure database. Only historic cycle dates are saved in the database, so a girl can change the mobile phone she uses and can still access her previous period information.