My Role
This project came out of a UX design challenge. I designed the project by myself, over 7 days. It required research into clinical therapy as a practice, along with its functions, and designing the interface.
Date
2022
tools
Figma
Challenge
Over the past two years there's been a significant uptick in the number of people pursuing therapy for help managing the anxiety and depression brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. This has increased the caseload for many therapists.
The Good Space is a large national network of remote therapists. The company needs a solution that allows their therapists to track and quantify the progress that their clients are making over the course of therapy.
Background
Therapy treatment plans are outlined by objectives, outcomes, and end goals. The "objective" is a task that the therapist assigns the patient that will help the patient reach their end goals. The "outcome" is the result of completing the objective. The "end goal" is the over arching goal of the treatment plan.
For example, a therapist might assign their patient an objective to leave their house to see a friend once a day. The desired outcome is that the patient feels less lonely and reduces their anxiety. The desired end goal of the treatment plan is that the patient is able to maintain friendships and has better coping mechanisms to deal with their social anxiety.
Solution
I designed a web app that distills treatment plan notes in an easy to read format. The focus of the product is to track the "objective completion rates" of individual patients.
I decided on this metric as it would allow therapists to quickly asses if patients are completing them and the outcomes of completing or not completing them. This metric is useful because it would make it easier to decide on intervention methods and catch pitfalls in the treatment.
Competitive Analysis
After surveying forums, articles, and publications run by therapists for therapists, I found that many of them are dissatisfied by current web app tools that claim to track patient progress. Other digital trackers focus strictly on mental health assessments and diagnoses. Therapists find these tools to be far too reductive to be of aide in tracking treatments.
Other notes:
- Common tools used are related to note taking, invoices, billing, scheduling, and document sharing across clients, providers, and insurance companies
- There are no comprehensive tool to quantify specifics of treatment plan
- Assessment tools make generalized judgments about clients with little to no context and don’t help with specifics of treatment plans
- There are no comprehensive tool to quantify specifics of treatment plan
- Assessment tools make generalized judgments about clients with little to no context and don’t help with specifics of treatment plans
Personas
This persona was made based off of statistics on therapists, sleuthing their forums, and reading articles written by them.
It was really helpful in gaining clarity on what issues to focus on. During my research phase I went through some information overload, but really picking out the biggest frustrations and needs helped me refocus.
Use Scenario
The use scenario exercise made me realize that therapists may want to look at the product during a session with a patient. This gave me the idea to design the layout to support the kinds of conversations a therapist might have during a session with a patient.
1. Wakes up and gets ready for work
2. Goes to their home office space to prepare for work
3. Checks portal on their client before the session
4. Notices a problem in the treatment plan and plans out a new solution
5. Has session with client and discusses the problem and the new solution
7. Client leaves session feeling optimistic about the treatment knowing that their therapist is carefully monitoring their health
8. Therapist leaves session feeling satisfied that they are helping their patient
2. Goes to their home office space to prepare for work
3. Checks portal on their client before the session
4. Notices a problem in the treatment plan and plans out a new solution
5. Has session with client and discusses the problem and the new solution
7. Client leaves session feeling optimistic about the treatment knowing that their therapist is carefully monitoring their health
8. Therapist leaves session feeling satisfied that they are helping their patient
Exploration
Therapeutic tool:
Therapists want their patients to be able to see their own patterns and progress made in therapy. Specifically, therapists talk about how often their patients don't see the amount of work and effort they have put into therapy. At one point I considered expanding the tool to also be used as a therapeutic tool as well. However, after doing some research I found that expanding the tool into this territory would be too cost intensive as it would have to go through rigorous research protocols in order to be accepted by clinical therapists.
Patient inputs:
I considered including inputs from patients about their daily lives to expand the data set. However, I decided not to go down this route because it could be tedious for patients and therapists would already be making note of their point of view during sessions, and once again since the patient would be involved it would have to go through more rigorous testing and require more time and resources.
Flow
1. Enter pass phrase
2. Open client portal
3. Upload therapy notes on client
4. Compiles data
5. Presents dashboard of trends based on notes
6. Shows outcomes and completion rate of objectives
7. Allows user to quickly scan through objectives and outcomes of individual sessions
8. Points out trends of objectives
9. Shows charts of assessments over time
2. Open client portal
3. Upload therapy notes on client
4. Compiles data
5. Presents dashboard of trends based on notes
6. Shows outcomes and completion rate of objectives
7. Allows user to quickly scan through objectives and outcomes of individual sessions
8. Points out trends of objectives
9. Shows charts of assessments over time
low fidelity prototype
The prototypes demonstrates how the user (therapist) might upload the notes and how the program would parse them. What they get is a dashboard outlining the most important data and trends about their patient. The highlight is the objective completion rate graph.
I've designed it so that therapists can quickly scan their notes to find trends with their patients. The graph shows the overall trend during treatment of how often objectives are completed. It also centers on specific days and shows a brief summary of notes. The user can also click on the notes and be taken to the full note sheet.
Final Figma Prototype
Next Steps
The next step for this prototype would be to get feedback from clinical therapists on the concept and the product. Additionally, I would like to experiment with more ways of showing the data of the notes, and what else could be added onto the dashboard.
