Project Overview

The Problem

We know that every day life can be stressful, and people want to seek mental health services, but not just any, they want convenient and affordable services. The worst aspect of finding health services is getting hit with a huge bill or getting rejected from your insurance because of coverage issues. Combine that with the long process of weaving through a selection of therapists to trying out different professionals to find the one person that you can connect with. The whole process is long, tiresome, and tedious. Therefore, to reduce as much stress as a user can face when searching for mental health services, we developed Mental Health Matching!

The Solutions

To address the current rise of telehealth, we wanted to create a mental health app that can address the needs of the people. Mental Health Matching is an app that helps individuals conveniently browse and select a therapist in the specialization that they need.

Competitor Analysis

To start off, we were well aware that COVID-19 has caused the rise of tele-health to skyrocket. Our first step is to conduct a competitor analysis with 3 of our biggest competitors in the market to find out how they have successfully addressed our problem and find out exactly how they have not.

What we found out from our analysis were:

Most apps required users to go through tedious and grueling questionnaires when signing up before getting matched to a therapist
Users do not have autonomy to pick their own therapists based on their interests or specializations
Users are able to see transparent reviews of therapists to consider whether they want a session with them.

User Research

Our biggest goal to create Mental Health Matching was to provide to users what other apps could not, and we wanted to focus on a tele-health app that gives users more autonomy than any other apps. With that being said, we started our user research with creating a proto persona and conduct a user interview to get to know our target users. We also sent out a survey to a wider selection of participant pool in hope of getting more insights into their needs.

From our survey data, we found the following insights:

The most important criterias users look for in a therapist is their gender, cultural background, and specialization
The biggest barriers that they face in getting access to mental health care is insurance issues/lack of coverage.

Upon finishing our 5:1 user interviews, we received a wide variety of feed backs from our users and their pain points. It is a common theme that users struggle to find a good therapist based on their interests as well as having a huge screening hurdle to surpass just to schedule a session.

User Persona

Based on our research, we gathered our data to create a user persona that fully represents and empathizes with our users' pain points and goals and interests.
‍
Despite our starting hypothesis, we found out that therapist experience and qualification played a bigger factor than relevant cultural identity. Here we have Amy, a 28 year old young professional, who recently lost her job and has gotten out of a serious relationship. She is looking for an affordable way to access mental health counseling.

We’ve noticed that in today’s stressful times, people need convenient and affordable access to quality mental health care.
How might we develop our app so that users are successful in selecting an experienced, affordable therapist who specializes in the area of expertise they are looking for based on an increase in the duration of the patient/therapist relationship?

With our data sorted, we formulated a problem statement to guide us into the next stage of our research.

Definition & Ideation

We started our brainstorming process with the Affinity Diagram to gather our data into one spot and from then on, use the I Like, I Wish, and What If model to prioritize what issues we want to work on.

We want to entertain the idea to include the following features into our app:

Allow users to find their own experienced therapists closest to what they were looking for
Ensure that the quality of a telehealth session is the same as a physical therapy session.

From our prioritization matrix, we came up with these key features we want to include in our app:

Short video greetings from therapists for users to have an understanding of therapist's interaction with their patients.
Therapy sessions will be available in multiple platforms (i.e video call, phone call, messaging)
Users will be given a 3 trial sessions so they can try out and pick their best matched therapist
Each therapists will have reviews posted on their page for full transparency.

User Storyboard

Our user flow is mapped out through a set of wireframe tasks and interactions.
Amy can forgo the screening process by importing her medical history (if possible). Then she can directly look at different therapist profiles and have a trial session with 3 separate therapists to find which one will be her best match.

User Flow

The following user storyboard will help us develop the user flow and envision how Amy will navigate through out app as we begin our prototype building process. We want to make sure that Amy finds our app useful and successfully match with a therapist and forgo the frustrating screening process.

Prototyping & Testing

Armed with our user flow fully developed, we started our prototyping process and conducted 2 rounds of usability tests with over 10 users on our lo-fi and mid-fi prototypes.

We were testing users on their feedbacks with the following tasks:

Prescreening process
Choosing a therapist and scheduling a session with them
Saving therapists in their saved list to eventually pick a therapist to match with

After attending all of her sessions, Amy was able to decide on which therapist she thinks fit her needs the most. However, she also has a choice to choose a therapist even if she has not used up her 3 trials.

Amy browses her options of therapists on her homepage and decided to book sessions with 3 different therapists.

Amy started her prescreening process with the option to import her medical history if it was available.

Iterations

1. Allow users to skip the prescreening process and add HIPAA related policies to explain why we wanted users to connect medical history.

2. Homepage is busy and hard for users to identify between specialties or pick specialists.

Our solution is to redesign the homepage as a carousel instead of horizontal scroll to showcase each therapist's information on their individual card that spans the whole screen. Therefore, making selection easier.

3. Scheduling calendar did not show therapist's availability and can cause issues with booking sessions

Our solution is to include a scrollable page where users can select an appointment meeting time that is convenient for them.

Final Product

Amy wants to find a therapist to seek mental health. She has tried tele-health before and found that this option works for her. She was able to go through the on-boarding process quickly and easily. There was no long questionnaires or screening process, instead she found that she could connect her medical history of previous therapist visits.

Amy also finds that is is easy for her to browse through therapists once she has finished the on-boarding process. She is able to view therapist's individual information, including their accreditations, specialties, years of experience, and reviews. She is able to browse through a selection of therapists depending on their specialty, such as Anxiety, Stress.

‍

Amy can easily schedule an appointment with the therapist of her choosing. She's able to view the therapist's availability for a week in advance and can choose the date and time to book with the therapist. When she finally has her appointment, all Amy has to do is to log into the app and have a video call with her therapist.

After her trial session, Amy is able to rate the session she had with the therapist and is given a choice of continuing with her remaining 2 free trials. Or she can select the therapist as her main therapist if she is happy with the session. Amy also has a choice to do her selection once she has used up all of her 3 trial sessions. Once she's selected a therapist, she is able to book more sessions with the therapist and start paying for her sessions.

KH

Mental Health Matching