Experience Redefined: “A UX Journey to Minimize Fear and Friction in Therapy”

Why this project?

1. With the ongoing pandemic, I felt it’s the need of the hour for an app like Joy where you can book the right therapist, at the comfort of your home. As far as I’ve researched there isn’t much of a proper “therapist booking” mental health apps for India.
2. Case studies I came across were solving in the same problem space like apps that book tickets, order food as such. So, I gave myself a challenge for my first project.
3. Instagram influencers giving unsolicited and half baked mental health advice :P and it's personally annoying. The worst part is people also believe it as true and follow it. As someone like me who wants to try therapy, that information is highly misleading. Hence want to create a handy, easy-to-use, and visually appealing therapist booking app.

Duration of the project : 3 Weeks

Research

I started my research by surfing online, trying to understand more about mental health and its impact, especially in India. Initially, I did an online Google Survey in which 89 people from different demographics participated to answer the questions regarding therapy & mental health.

Before my research, I had a lot of assumptions, which I believed will be true for sure. But after my research, to my surprise, I got a whole lot of different perspectives which I never thought of.

For example, I’ve assumed most people, in general, don’t know about mental health and therapy. But the people I interviewed said that they knew what therapy is but they are not sure about the whole experience of therapy. Like what happens inside a therapy room, how it works, how many sessions will it take to get better? They don't even know what is the takeaway from a therapy session.

To dig deeper into this, I spoke to 6 strangers who were on my friend's list on different social media platforms to understand about their

1. Lifestyle routine & behavior

2. Approach towards mental health and therapy

3. Usage of any mental health apps, if so how it’s impacting them.

I also approached a professional mental health counsellor and a therapist. I interviewed both of them trying to understand their pain points and behaviour as well as the user’s from their encounters and perspectives.

To get even more clarity, I did a competitor analysis of around 5- 6 other mental health apps namely Wysa, 7 cups, Minddoc, Practo, BetterHelp, and few others. ( some of them were either meditating and calming apps. It was a bit hard to find a proper therapist booking app for an Indian audience). I even checked each app’s Google reviews to understand what the users are expecting. On the whole, I tried to understand the app’s

1. User goals
2. Design choices
3. UX screen flows
4. Business model
5. Choice of words and tone in their UX copy
6. Value that they are providing to the user.

Once I collected all the information and data, I grouped them under similar behavior and patterns to shape the problem even better.

Finally based on my research findings and data, I concluded that major problems that are stopping/scaring people from therapy are

- Social stigma

- Trust issues

- Privacy concerns

- Difficult to find the right & quality therapists

- Lack of or having a false knowledge about therapy

- Affordability

But how do we solve it?

Initially, I started ideating and sketching out the different solutions but most of them weren’t hitting the right sweet spot as I expected. Few were on the right path, and few weren’t. I could sense this because of my frequent habit of asking “Why & How” on everything I do. It again took me a bit of research, a barrel of coffee, and finally some sleepless nights. So after multiple iterations, I finally got the flow of screens that I thought would work.

P.s: Only I can understand my handwriting :P

Once the flow and idea is ready I created a high-fidelity wireframe skeleton on Figma with first draft product copies

But did this solve the problem? No! I showed it to a couple of my friends and got some feedback to reiterate it to make it even better. I went back to research again to understand the problem even more and how to come up with better solutions.

Mood Board

Visual Design

• Since it's a therapy app, I thought of using blue color and its shades to match the calmness and vibe of the brand.
• I personally liked and used pictures instead of vectors so that it gives more of a human connect which is very important, especially for an app like Joy.
• Used Sans-Serif font “Proxima Nova” to look subtle yet professional.
• Named it as “Joy” and designed the logo “ J” looks like it has a smile.

Now let’s solve the problem!

1. Trust Issues

Based on the conversations I had with the mental health counselor and therapist I also understood that there is a huge gap in finding the right as well as a qualified therapist for an individual. It's more like finding someone on a dating app with whom you could vibe because in therapy you become a more vulnerable person in front of a stranger. So the therapist should make you more comfortable and be trustworthy even before they start to diagnose you.

I also noticed a pattern that there are high chances of people trusting & booking therapists referred by their friends in real life rather than booking someone random on the app. Most of the people whom I know and in their circle as well follow this.

So trust is a huge issue. Before you even trust a therapist, you need to trust the app.

That’s why we have a cover video rather than just a picture. The cover video will be a maximum of 5–10 seconds of the therapist telling who they are and their specialization. This helps the user not only to have an idea of how the therapist sounds but also builds trust on them.

To Increase this trust quotient, even more, we also have an option to schedule video call sessions thrice for free with any therapists before you book them. These intro sessions need not necessarily be the user explaining the problem to the therapist nor the therapist trying to probe to understand the user. These sessions could be even a conversational understanding, to begin with. This helps the user to understand more about the therapist and make the user feel comfortable and safe talking to them, before booking them.

Usually, few mental health apps provide their first therapy session for free. but splitting one hour into 3 — 20 min sessions with different therapists increases the probability of finding the right one for the users rather than having just one session.

This feature could also be a potential business model subscription to increase the no. of times the user could schedule a video call with therapists once their limited turns are over.

Having Testimonials and even adding a blue tick near the therapist's name to indicate the therapist is licensed (and above 10 years of experience ) increases credibility. ( All the pictures are taken from google and names are fictional just for the project’s sake)

2. Difficult to find the right therapist

Another major problem the users had was finding the right therapist for them. Based on the research and survey data, I created a filter section covering major criteria which helps the user to sort down to best results.

One of the difficult design choices I had to make here was to either have common mental health problems as tags or giving the option to users where they can search by symptoms like in medical apps. But I realized the tags are much better because

1. Medical health issues are completely different from Mental health issues.
2. Unlike medical health issues, there is an overlap of symptoms for different conditions in mental health problems. Like the panic can transform to depression depending upon the level of severity. ( Panic — anxiousness — anxiety — depression ). So the basic symptoms for all of these will be more or less the same. So we can’t have users select some 5 symptoms and conclude that they have depression.
3. There is a high chance of the users seeing so many symptoms, psychologically that they tend to think they have one even if they don’t.
4. Of course, there will be users who don't know what they are going through, they can simply select “others”. (It is supported with a small copy under the tags ) This will not affect the search. Therapists who have tags comfortable dealing with certain issues can still diagnose you and help you out. This is more like a college student taking tuition for a first standard kid. The student is well versed with both college and school syllabus. But when it comes to a medical health issue, where u a have kidney stone but u think its a heart disease and book a cardiologist. The cardiologist cannot give a solution to kidney stones.

3. Privacy Concerns

This is a set of questions that have been asked during the onboarding before letting the user into the app. Adding a relevant copy to address why and how the user’s data or information will be used can give them a huge relief. This is very important especially for an app handling sensitive data and also guides the users in the right way showcasing transparency.

4. Social Stigma

In spite of downloading the app, still, the user could still be not ready to book their first appointment due to various reasons. This could be solved by nudging them on emphasising how seeking help for mental health is not a stigma and also encourage them to book their first appointment. Once they book their first appointment congratulating them will give the users more confidence to attend their first session and also makes them feel that they have made the right choice.

5. Lack of Knowledge

As much as lack of knowledge is a prominent problem that is stopping people from starting therapy, likewise having a false /little knowledge about therapy is also a major reason.

Adding a set of educational videos like “How therapy works?”( videos changes periodically once the user has seen it quite a number of times ) on top of the home screen not only educates the user but also helps to understand what can be expected before, during, and after a therapy session. This gives the user a sense of confidence by dispersing the false knowledge they had about therapy in the first place

6. Adding Value to the user

I also felt features like Mind Playground, where users can find articles, videos, and audiobooks regarding mental health exercises & Community Support for chatting with trained professionals (volunteers) when u are having a sudden breakdown will be of great use. Journals to keep track of ur emotions. SOS is also provided on top of the home screen in case of an emergency. FAQ Section gives u a clear idea about the app, mental health, and process of booking therapists.

Was it all easy??

No, definitely not! Throughout the project, I understood various nuances and perspectives with every feedback I received. It helped me understand the problem from different angles and come up with a better solution every time.

Here is a GIF of Initial Version vs Final Version Design

Final prototype (GIF)

Feedback from the user

Finally, the prototype has been put to usability testing and received various feedbacks from around 10 -15 people and this is what some of them wanted to say :)

Struggles faced during this project

1. Before starting this project I never knew anything about UI or UX, I started self-learning from various resources along with learning Figma on the side, which took a bit of time.
2. Initially in the project, I was too focused on solution space rather than understanding the problem in-depth.
3. Was having an imposter syndrome every time I shared the design/prototype with someone.
4. Reiteration was a bit difficult in the beginning stages

Learnings

1. Understood the whole process of design thinking & user-centered design. It helped me to understand when you design you should have the user, design & product’s perspective to get a better output rather than just focus on design.
2. Since I did a couple of mistakes in the initial stages of the project, it helped me to do reverse engineering to go back and forth to understand what went wrong, how can it be solved, and also avoided in future
3. I think I have developed a mindset on how to approach a problem and also understood reiteration is where the product gets polished.
4. Though I had imposter syndrome initially, from knowing nothing to having a project completed gave me a lot of confidence and satisfaction.

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