How to bring psychotherapy closer to people looking for help

Intro

The 2020 was a hard year for everybody, the level of stress and anxiety increased massively across the world. Add that to the level of anxiety without the global coronavirus pandemic and you will have the global anxiety pandemic (GAP).

I was part of a passion project to design the experience of better mental health through easy to find and access psychotherapists in Romania.

Problem

Talking about your mental health issues and what you are going through with someone close to you might raise some eyebrows.

Finding and talking to a licensed therapist is quite a difficult task. Especially if you want to be anonymous about getting help.

Although there are some digital solutions to solve this problem in Romania, we took the challenge to come up with a new solution in the market.

Roles & Responsibilities

I was a solo UX designer in a team consisting of two cofounders who came up with the idea.

The company had a name and branding done by an external agency.

We also worked with a brand positioning team to better understand the users we are trying to reach.

My Role

I facilitated a design sprint, designed the high fidelity interactive prototype for the app, and conducted user testing interviews via zoom, gathered feedback and insights.

Scope & constraints

The two co-founders have never been involved in the product development before, so I took an educators hat in this project, teaching about the ins-and-outs of bringing an app to the marketplace.

The project was self-funded by the co-founders, so it had quite a tight budget.

I tried to guide the project in a way that would not generate additional costs for no reason.

Discovery

To get things going after our first meeting with the entrepreneurs, we’ve scheduled a couple of hours each day of the week for a design sprint workshop, to learn about what we want to achieve from this project, what problems we are really trying to solve and for who.

We’ve gone (somewhat) successfully through all the steps of the design sprint. At the end of the week we had a concept ready to be transformed into a prototype for a mobile app.

The design sprint

During the sprint, we’ve identified the key moving factors of such a business and what problems there currently exist in this industry.

Since this was my first facilitation of a design sprint, I found myself reaching for the “textbook” before every meeting in order to get a better understanding of the outcomes at the end of the meeting.

I tried to fit into the design sprint 2.0 by AJ & Smart, but found it difficult to keep up with the schedule. Most of the activities were delayed by a day or two. I tried to keep the activities time constrained by putting a deadline on the deliverables on the second day, so we can jumpstart into what we had planed.

Nevertheless it was a fun and engaging experience.

The mobile app prototype

Designing the first iteration

For the first iteration of the potential app we’ve gone with the assumption that people would need to gain some trust in the app before they would decide to pay for it, so we’ve sketched a “learning section” inside the app, so users can first learn a bit about psychotherapy and get in the mood.

The concept of the app itself is inspired by the US competitor apps “BetterHelp” and “Talkspace”.

The app was designed in order to fulfill the most important user flow, the one on which a user gets to talk to a therapist in a very simple manner. I call it the “happy task flow”.

The happy task flow for the app was:

• Find about the app through google ads
• Install the app
• Walk through the onboarding screens
• Create an account
• Enter the Homepage
• Click on “Start searching” CTA
• Fill out the matching form
• Learn about the subscription plans
• Select a subscription plan
• Select a therapist from the list we provided
• Chat with your therapist.
• Good Job (Happy face)