Background

SonderMind is a Denver based company which aims to connect local psychologists and therapists with clients looking for support. As a team, we were given the opportunity to redesign the provider portal, a site that only therapists use. The functionality of the existing provider portal had structural and organizational issues, making the navigation unclear to users. Our team designed a provider portal which enables users to schedule appointments, process insurance claims, notify users of tasks and edit profile pages. We focused on the desktop version of the provider portal as it had the most usage.

The Goal

According to research gathered by our team, a large majority of therapists do not consider themselves tech savvy and have difficulty navigating the existing provider platform. Our solution was to create an experience that would simplify processes (such as claims submission and client management). The team also wanted to optimize performance of existing functions and reorganize the platform.  

Research

Heuristic Evaluation

Our team used Capian to capture screenshots and analyze them for design issues. We found a number of issues that could impact the providers every day tasks. It was understandable why providers found the platform difficult to use; there were a large amount of usability issues including critical issues where essential parts of the system were virtually unusable for providers. Providers had to dig for essential task information and were often mislead by ambiguous labels or given little direction as to what to do next. The system response to users’ actions were, oftentimes unexpected and users were unable to navigate back to the origin of the mistake. The website did not use conventional design patterns, which made it more confusing for users to navigate. There were also a lot of road blocks when it came to trying to create appointments and file claims that made it more of a challenge than the task already is. It was no surprise to us that providers were struggling to complete tasks using the provider portal.

In our design iterations, we made sure to provide clear guidance and unambiguous cues for finding topics within the website. We changed numerous pages on the website to comply with well accepted design standards and conventions to make it more usable. Finally, we provided more detail to the content to clarify guidance for tasks and provided explicit feedback that was evenly executed throughout the website.

Interviews

Our users consist of therapists and psychologists who work for SonderMind as providers. These providers can be licensed through SonderMind to work with select insurances, a benefit that most private therapists do not have/offer. Providers schedule clients, manage existing client base and new referrals, submit insurance claims and generally maintain a lengthy list of their daily tasks. We were able to interview 1 SonderMind Provider, 5 Private Providers ,and 1 Training Lead from SonderMind Headquarters. The team gathered a few key takeaways from the various interviews:

Key Takeaways

Private Practitioners

• Providers strongly feel that typing notes (and sometimes even writing notes) takes away from the personal connection they have with their clients. Because of this, many providers still use the pen and paper method of taking notes if any notes are taken at all.

• A majority of providers affirmed that they were not “tech savvy.” Although some providers used digital means for scheduling appointments, many still used paper appointment schedulers.

• Most providers have a challenging time with the insurance and billing portions of their careers. This aspect of the therapy process is very time consuming and arduous, so much so that a large number of practitioners did not accept insurance because of the difficulty. Some would even send insurance and billing claims to an outside billing specialist to complete them.

SonderMind Practitioners

• SonderMind providers echoed a lot of what private practice providers experienced such as using pen and paper and not feeling very tech savvy. They were interested in being a provider for SonderMind due to the belief in the company values (what are these company values?) and what it offered to clients, but found little task completion support in the platform they were required to use, which fell short of their expectations.

• Providers would often wait until approaching deadlines or miss claim submissions entirely due to the lengthy process it required as well as the roundabout process to submit claims.

• Providers did not utilize the SonderMind therapist portal as intended due to its difficult navigation, and felt as though they had to dig for important pages and information especially involving insurance claims.

Competitive Analysis

Not only did our team study comparable client matching systems, but also well developed scheduling platforms used in both private practice and other businesses. We utilized free trials to understand and dissect the components of each platform.
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Ideate

With all the rich information gathered from research, our team began to define the problems and brainstorm feasible solutions we could bring to the platform to make it function and feel better to users.

User Journeys

In order to better understand the process of a provider, we created  journey maps for both a new provider and a seasoned provider.

We needed to…

• Give therapists more ownership over the process
• Make on boarding simpler
• Train thoroughly and reduce questions
• Accommodate different learning styles or accessibility issues
• Make the calendar easier to use/read
• Make all pertinent information available at a glance
• Ensure clients do not fall through the cracks
• Decrease referral response time
• Shorten claim submission process
• Reduce administrative responsibilities from providers plates

Here’s our Journey Map for a Seasoned Provider

Personas

Based on the interviews/journey maps, we created a Provider Persona. Providers do a lot in a day and are constantly giving to those in need. In our process, we wanted to make sure the providers had a significantly easier course of action when dealing with processing and scheduling in order to make client relationships and provider ease the primary focus. We referred to this provider persona throughout the design process.

Design

Wireframes

We decided that we wanted to work through a few different user flows; Claims and Referrals, Calendar, Dashboard and Profiles. During the wireframing portion of designing, Elyza was tasked with designing Claims and Referrals Section, Skylair designed the Calendar section, and I designed the Provider Dashboard, Provider Profile and Client Profiles seen below.
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High Fidelity Mockups

After a meeting with the SonderMind team, we pivoted our focus to claims submission, referrals, creating a dashboard and a provider profile. We were able to use SonderMind’s style guide through the process to keep on brand with their existing look and feel.

Validate

Due to the short timeframe of the project, we were not able to perform routine usability testing. If we were able, we would have liked to perform A/B Testing on our last iterations of the portal with at least 8 subjects. In the time alotted, we decided to focus on the needs of SonderMind and focusing in the places that would be most useful to them by suggesting more viable solutions.

Next Steps

Our team consulted with SonderMind for this capstone project at General Assembly’s UXDI program. With 3 weeks to work on deliverables, there was limited time to complete everything that we would have liked. If we had unlimited time, we would have loved to dig deeper into the gamification, referrals and community functions. Our team used the limited time and resources very efficiently, and we had enough time to understand further work that would have a ver positive impact on the providers’ experience of using the portal.

• Gathering data from a larger data set of SonderMind providers to gain a deeper understanding of ways to support providers so that they feel appreciated, motivated and clear minded.

• We also would have loved to conduct user testing to be able to understand what was working with our design and what wasn’t and reiterate as needed.

Through this work, we were able to experience the challenges of working on a project with a limited time, resources, and communication of requirements from stakeholders. It was a great opportunity to work with actual stakeholders and learning to balance business and user needs according to their priorities. We organized and prioritized our time, and strategized as a team in order to accomplish the most feasible and useful goals while creating a high-quality design.

Are you ready? So am I