CLIENT PROJECT
A mobile-first web application designed to help users in the LGBTQ+ community access and review relevant therapists and also find a community where they can learn from people's experiences in order to meet their mental health care needs.
Sindano Health describes themselves as "a data analytics and SaaS technology company developing community-informed AI solutions to address disparities in mental health outcomes for LGBTQ+ communities through a racial equity lens. Sindano Health makes it easier for LGBTQ+ communities to access appropriate, empathetic, and competent therapists, thereby improving overall patient and community health outcomes".
Sindano
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Role
UX/UI Designer
Project Duration
3 Weeks
Tools
Figma + Figjam + Canva
Team
4 UX/UI Designers & Researchers
Scope of Work
Goal
To research, create and deliver a MVP of the community forum & updated review flow on the proposed Sindano web application, in preparation for beta testing.
Create a community forum
Update existing therapist search and review flow including error messages
Conduct research and provide reports
Roles & Responsibilities
We worked in collaboration with Sindano's Head of Product and CEO/Founder.
Users and Audience
LGBTQ+ identifying individuals
Mental Health Professionals
Hospitals and Healthcare Systems
Discovering & Empathizing
User Research
We conducted 11 in-depth interviews with users that identify as an LGBTQ+ individual, to gain understanding of existing pain points in obtaining a mental healthcare professional and thoughts around community forums. After creating an affinity map, we drew 3 main themes out of the nearly 300 data points.
Interview Takeaways & Themes
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Access to Relevant Therapists
Users want to know therapist credentials and treatment backgrounds as well as finding a provider that understands their unique identity.
Online Community
Users desire to connect with others outside of their immediate social circle to connect with others of the same identity to share/gain knowledge around mental health and feel less alone.
Thoughts on Anonymity
Users expressed their concerns on the safety of sharing personal thoughts on the internet (e.g. trolls, comments can be used against them).
“It’s helpful to know people are having similar experiences - sometimes I can feel alone even in my own social circles, so to have access to other experiences helps to make you feel not so lonely.”
Competitor Analysis & Feature Inventory
We also took notes from competitor platforms and gained inspiration from some of the features that could enhance Sindano's user experience.
I helped complete a feature inventory to gain insight for the new Sindano community forum and compared 5 direct competitors.
Key Takeaways included:
"Must have" features like a search bar, upvoting, anonymous usernames and predetermined topics
Peer moderators
How to categorize and create hierarchy within the community groups with sub-topics and replies
Communicating guidelines each user must agree to - in order to foster a safe environment
Navigation includes hamburger menu, name of group and search funcion
Main categories under the group
Profile name and photo
Turn on notifications for post
Similar navigation features, but with popular topics dropdown
Facebook Groups
Photo shared by user
Upvote, downvote, reply, share and award features
We factored in each key takeaway from the user interviews along with other prominent research points to create our persona. Our insights showed us that our persona is a queer person who has struggled to find an in-network therapist.
Persona
Problem Statement
Adrian needs a safe space to share their experiences and find a relevant therapist so that they can quickly find competent mental health support and feel less alone.
Once we had our persona defined, we were able to better narrow our focus on what issues to prioritize in our designs. We wrote out several How Might We's and came up with a central problem statement.
Defining the Problem
After conducting a Heuristic Evaluation of the existing Sindano mobile web app using Jakob Nielsen's 10 general principles for interaction design and 3 Usability Test attempts (all 10 heuristics failed & inability to complete any tasks), we determined many gaps in the user flows and began to create updated user flows.
Ideation
Sketches & Wireframes
After agreeing as a group on what elements each wireframe was deemed necessary, we divided and conquered the design portion of each screen. I had a huge part in creating the mid-fidelity and high-fidelity mockups for the community forum (Examples above).
We wanted to incorporate the insights gathered from the competitor analysis, as well as edge cases and error states that may occur.
A few of these include adding user guidelines for leaving reviews and rules to adhere to before joining the community, and creating a "SindanoBot" work alongside peer moderators to keep the community inclusive and safe for everyone.
Communities Sketch
Communities Mid-Fi Wireframe
Communities Final MVP
UI Inspiration & Color Exploration
To increase accessibility and inclusivity, we needed to update a few of the primary colors in the existing color palette. We also added more contrast to meet WCAG standards and widened the buttons to add more clickable space.
We tried not to deviate too far from Sindano's original colors by keeping a more muted version of their existing green, as well as two lighter tones of the same color for a modern, clean image.
We chose an accent color of yellow as it represents happiness, optimism, and energy and remains consistent with the sun in Sindano's logo.
Design Updates
Prototyping & Usability Testing
We tested Adrian's 3 main goals:
to find a therapist
make a post in a community
submit a review
In the chart, you can see that between usability tests 1 and 2, the average time to complete tasks drastically decreased from around 3.5 minutes down to around 1 minute per task. We had 6 participants in round 1, and 3 participants in round 2.
All of the users were able to complete every task in both rounds (100% completion rate) which is a vast improvement from the initial usability tests at the beginning of the project (0%).
First Round
Second Round
Minor, yet necessary, tweaks were made after round 1, such as not scrolling/ views being cut off and dropdowns not working, which led to longer task completion times. We corrected the prototypes to resolve these issues.
The community forum was a bit hidden as no CTA or mention of the forum was on the home screen. Users needed to find it solely on the hamburger menu. So we changed one of the CTA buttons to lead to the community.
Users were looking for more insurance options, therapist certification information as well as race and gender selections, so we edited the forms and questions to incorporate more of these requests.
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Additional options for insurance types were still requested by users (ie. Uninsured/ Self Pay options), which we then added.
CTA buttons on how to contact a therapist were confusing, and the flow was not very clear. One user expected a calendar, rather than an email to make an appointment, so updated the copy to more of a contact form instead of scheduling.
One user was still concerned about anonymity with reviewing a therapist but a lot of details were needed to inform the healthcare partners as part of the data collection aspect of the business module, so not much can be done without the CEO and Head of Product approval. It was also felt that too many questions were being asked which we noted in our research report for Sindano to review.
Lessons Learned
The mental health space coupled with users that can vary greatly in background, gender, and sexuality leads to taking in a lot of considerations for each person. Each has their unique story and it's hard to cover each identifier of every person but most users that came across this app rated they would 5/5 recommend this to a friend. I think it is wise to gather as much research as possible to stay ahead of the curve and keep users content.
We learned after our design handoff that a few key considerations were missing:
User research around feeling safer with an invite-only code as the main way to create a login
The landing page should differ from the homepage
Users should have the ability to add a provider to the database
We think better communication and showing deliverables like user flows and any mockups, during stand-up meetings in our next client interactions might help to avoid missing any of these key elements.
High Priority
Medium Priority
Continue to build out the responsive desktop version of patient flows
Create provider flows and prototype for desktop and mobile web app
Research and build dashboard views for stakeholders and machine learning modules
Create an About Us page
Add resources and blog pages (e.g. meditation, "mental health 101", provider types defined, mental health vocabulary)
Customer research for data analytics and reporting service
Possible partnership structure such as referral links from Sindano's site
Next Steps
Sindano Prototype
Click through the final design below!
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