Background:

In the wake of both the pandemic and racial violence, there’s the potential for an increase in the number of people impacted by mental health conditions. While anyone can experience the challenges of mental illness regardless of their background, facing discrimination can significantly worsen symptoms. Racial/ethnic, gender, and sexual minorities often suffer from poor mental health outcomes due to multiple factors including inaccessibility of high quality mental health care services, cultural stigma surrounding mental health care, discrimination, and overall lack of awareness about mental health.

Goal:

Although mental health is complex issue for a lot of people: educating others, creating awareness, encourage action, and-or facilitate access to minority mental health care for the misunderstood, overlooked and underrepresented communities can improve situation drastically.

Solution:

Design an inclusive third-party platform that is easy to use, will have resources to educate users, detailed process for searching the best match therapist for ANYONE, tools for self-help and information for people in crisis.

Project duration: 1 month

My role: UX Designer

Tools:

• Google survey/ Docs

• Google meets

• Miro

• Figma

• Happy scribe (audio transcript)

Initial Research:

Increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in mental health is not an easy task. Disparities exist regarding mental health disorders for ethnic, gender, age, and sexual minorities due to multiple reasons. Studies show that mental health is more efficient if the therapist connected or can relate to cultural, religious and gender and sexual differences.

Research Objectives:

• Understand what users think about their mental health.

• What actions they take to solve their mental health issues if any. If not what stops them from seeking help.

• Evaluate pain points users are experiencing when looking for a professional therapist.

• Learn about competitor apps/ websites that are on the market.

Market Research:

Through several hours of researching online the following valuable information from recent studies on minority mental health disparities was gathered.

• Ethnic/racial minorities often bear a disproportionately high burden of disability resulting from mental disorders.

• Although rates of depression are lower in blacks (24.6%) and Hispanics (19.6%) than in whites (34.7%), depression in blacks and Hispanics is likely to be more persistent. 

• People who identify as being two or more races (24.9%) are most likely to report any mental illness within the past year than any other race/ethnic group, followed by American Indian/Alaska Natives (22.7%), white (19%), and black (16.8%).

• American Indians/Alaskan Natives report higher rates of posttraumatic stress disorder and alcohol dependence than any other ethic/ racial group.

Competitive analysis

Keeping in mind target audience (minority/ diverse populations) it is important to look at competition to understand what features are absolute must on a market and what can be improved.

Key Insights:

• All competitors connect users with therapy professional whether it is through match or search.

• Most of competitors are insurance based fully or partially.

• Most of competitors offer on-line sessions.

• Only one competitor goes beyond standard search offering detailed questionnaire to match with therapist.

• Most of competitors do not consider cultural, gender, sexual, racial minorities and only helpful for general audience.

• Users can not apply any filters besides therapist’s specialization or insurance company.

Survey

Based on above mentioned findings some of the questions arose so as part of research the survey was conducted to understand what are the problems users experience currently in a challenging financial post-pandemic period. Also survey helps to determine specific direction to better prepare for user interviews.

Survey was conducted among people from 11 different ethnic, racial, sexual, gender minority populations.

• As an additional point in making decision participants want free 10 min trial to understand if they feel comfortable with therapist.

• Only 15,6% participant don’t feel a need in therapy sessions.

User Interview Findings:

One-on-one interviews with users showed that all of them shared similar frustrations and pain points. The results were synthesized into:

Empathy Map

Assembling empathy map using direct quotes from user interviews will helps not only to get into user mindset but also in creating user persona in the next steps.

User Persona

These are different types of user personas. Their personality was created by compilating primary and secondary research. Creating user persona will help and guide the rest of design process.

Customer Journey Map

Creating journey map is helpful to know the persona experience using websites for online therapy. Exploring their emotions and thoughts while they are trying to reach their goal. It was important to understand that the onboarding process is the most important feature (since the results of it will be used for matches) together with a cost will determine if the platform solves the problem for minority populations who try to get quality mental health services with consideration of their background.

Ideate

Before jumping info putting together wireframes, typography and etc it was decided to put together small table to stay focused on user and business goals.

User Flow

Defining some simple steps that users will take to complete each block. This flow helped to focus on keeping sign up simple but making sure user will complete it. Staying focused on sign up part of this project is the goal because it is the the most important feature.

Lo-Fi Wireframes

Based on research and user flows next wireframes were generated. Although 5 step sign up may seem long but in some cases such as this one it is important to collect as much of important information from user to provide search results that will meet users needs and provide measurable information why this match is suggested to user.

Style & Typography

Keeping everything simple and using calm color palette was something that been decided from the very beginning. creating moodboard helped to decide on a main theme of UI. The aim was to create calming, trusting and helping feeling when using platform. And during the test it have been found out that those feeling were achieved.

Usability Testing

Four usability test the plan and outlined expectations were set up. Hi-Fi wireframes were tested with 4 participant (2 of them were participating in user interviews and other 2 didn’t have any therapy experience but were planning to start eventually). The participants were asked to complete simple sign up flow. Task was easy: create account, choose therapist and add a payment method.

Objectives:

• Complete user onboarding and register as a new user

• Identify pain points

• Deploy any improvements for better usability

• Observe user interactions within platform as well as gather feedback, impressions of: navigation, process, overall design, simplicity of the process.

Key insights and Recommendations

Iteration and Implementation

Next task is to use feedback from testing and implement into existing design. User testing was extremely helpful since it is showed me important flaws that can influence overall user experience.
These are changes that were done for better experience:

• Implemented changes in usage of color to attract attention to important parts (heading in section 2 about how therapy helps, participants didn’t notice it so they were confused with cards). Also change of button color to create memory of clickable elements associated with this specific color

• Excluded, rearranged most confusing for participants parts of questionnaire (such as question about identity, financial situation, therapist preference) as well as use of different vocabulary

• Creatde FAQ page, as well as small info element to inform users about cost of sessions

• Some of the elements of screen 2 were hidden behind “show more” button to make page less crowded

• Rearranged therapist’s profile for better space use

• Added payment methods, and instead of payment page (which was the most questionable part of onboarding) it was decided to make it “link a card” page

Solutions

Landing page

• Telling users the price of therapy on a landing page can save a lot of time for everyone so this is what was decided to do.

• Explaining the benefits of therapy in a different aspects of life, the process of choosing therapists for platform, how platform works, and numbers for crisis situation gives general idea of what this platform dedicated to.

Resources and FAQ screens

• Being able to learn more about different mental health issues was one of the most important point both during survey and user interviews. Some users are not ready to jump into therapy right away so they prefer to search through free resources to understand their own situation. Also free resources can be helpful tool in creating awareness.

• FAQ section is vital part of any website and it was proven again during usability test stage

Onboarding screens

• The purpose of onboarding flow is to gather enough information from a user and suggest best matching therapist and provide info on how many and what topics from onboarding questions therapist works with.

• Considering business part of this project is was decided to still have some sort of “payment” page. But to make it easy for users it was decided to turn it into “link a card” screen. This way they don’t have to pay for anything right away and be able to use full version of platform to learn about it more and make a decision afterwards. They are still given opportunity to skip this step.

• A lot of survey and interview participants wanted some sort of free trial call which is understandable because they want to know if they “vibe” with therapist, but it might be too difficult for therapists to do. The solution for this problem was adding introductory video feature in therapist’s profiles. This way users can learn a little bit about personality of therapists, the way they communicate. The usability test showed great results from participants.

Next steps

• Consider different ways of enhancing the experience in-depth

• To ensure that it is really inclusive for every user

• Create flow for becoming therapist, as well as flow for editors in Resources part of site

• Dashboard for both individuals and therapists

• Product scaling strategy (mobile version) so that users can use it from any device, some of interview participants admitted they had to do calls from their car using their phone.

Key takeaways

• Understanding that there is no need to come up with unique innovations. During this case study I found out that using best working patterns is more beneficial than trying to come up with something unique and innovating. I focused on improving rather than inventing.

• Really diving deep into understanding problems with health care system in US (as a foreigner I was terrified of how non-functional it is) and learning from American Psychiatric Association researches on Minority mental health and health disparities helped me to better prepare for my primary research and ask right questions.

• Covid pandemic opened eyes of many people on importance of mental health. This challenging times helped to raise problems related to mental health to a new level, created huge awareness and hopefully will lead to creating of more tools and opportunities to help people.