Sprint
3
(Currently in progress)
A New Mission
As the team prepared to start Sprint 3, we got a sudden dose of reality in seeing how projects can change when you step out of the classroom and into the realm of real-world businesses. In January of 2025 (over our winter break), Guide underwent a dramatic restructuring, steering away from being an HRMS platform and pivoting to a content platform focused on mental health.
This changes everything!
A Rebranded Guide
Guide’s new mission is now focused on improving mental health care by increasing engagement between mental health providers (therapists, doctors) and their patients. Instead of hosting training content for company e-learning modules, the Guide platform will allow therapists to share content (primarily video-based) directly with clients, and provide patients with a library of digital resources to explore between treatment sessions.
Updating Our Scope
In order to design an effective solution for our client, we needed to adjust our problem statement and long term goals:
Problem Statement
Patients need an efficient way to find therapeutic content, while providers need better tools to assign and track progress. Guide currently lacks a seamless system to bridge this gap, leading to inefficiencies in treatment adherence.
Long Term Goals
- Enhance search functionality by refining relevance, usability, and navigation based on iterative user testing from Sprint 2
- Convert designs into high-fidelity prototypes, ensuring a polished and user-friendly experience.
- Expand “My Guide” into a two-sided interface, allowing patients to track progress while enabling providers to assign, monitor, and manage engagement seamlessly.
Salvaging Our Design - What Still Fits?
Upon learning of the mission change, a few key questions quickly emerged:
- Which features of our mid-fidelity designs are still applicable to Guide’s new customers? Can they be tweaked to fit the new audience?
- Do we know enough about our new users to create the next iteration of our design?
The Key Takeaway:
Our client was eager for a quick redesign by "reskinning" our previous iteration. However, we felt that as UX designers, it would be beneficial to both the client, his customers, and the target audience of the product to do some additional user research.
Research: Round 2
Design Review
User Interviews
Using a mixture of different technologies, we conducted new interviews with health professionals to better understand how they conduct patient sessions and leverage supplemental resources in treatment plans.
Combining the abilities of Audacity, Revoldiv, and ChatGPT allowed me to digitally transcribe and summarize multiple hours of audio content into numerically-organized snippets highlighting key themes.
Interview Statistics: At A Glance
- Participants: 5
- Professions: LCSW w/ teaching experience (retired), PhD Clinical Psychologist (retired), DO (active), LSCW (active), Occupational Therapist (active)
- Ages: ~30-75
Simulated User Research Using AI
Using ChatGPT, we created a digital simulation of a user interview by training the AI to behave as a mental health professional using its available knowledge base.
Note: While insights generated from this effort were incorporated into our team’s design, I was not personally a participant in this activity.
Feature Analysis
As we further explored the product market for tools that allow for sharing of mental health video content, we needed to conduct focused feature analysis on key competitors in the mental health space, such as Carepatron, PSYCHOLOGY TOOLS, Talkspace, and Amwell. This analysis was critical for identifying core features that align with our project’s revised scope and understanding how other platforms manage user-specific content and privacy. After discussing our client’s constraints—especially when content is uploaded privately or needs to be specific to individual patients—we decided to shift our focus toward enhancing the dashboard, concentrating on assigning content and tracking it for each patient.
Key Research Takeaways
In the context of using Guide:
- Mental health providers would value the ability to sort available content based on diagnosis categories.
- A mental health resource platform should have safeguards for sensitive content. Some materials should be freely accessible, while others should require provider approval before being assigned/shared.
- According to mental health professionals, patients are more likely to complete supplemental therapy assignments if they are short and directly relevant to their struggles.
- Mental health providers want to avoid overwhelming patients with assignments/tasks, instead focusing on one achievable goal at a time.
- Therapists need a reliable way to assess whether online mental health resources are legitimate before recommending them. Legal oversight is crucial for a mental health platform to protect against liability, especially when dealing with high-risk populations.
- Therapeutic assignments don’t have to be literature-based; they can also be experiential, like watching a movie or attending a community event.
- Many mental health platforms struggle because they don’t tailor content to individual patients.
- A curated resource library with vetted content would be more useful than an open database of mixed-quality materials.
And most importantly,
For therapists, the majority of time spent outside therapy sessions is dedicated to writing progress notes and dealing with insurance. They don’t have time to sift through large amounts of irrelevant content, so search results need to be targeted. If a digital platform requires extra work for therapists to use it effectively, they’re unlikely to adopt it.
Coming Soon:
The team is now converting our research on the needs of mental health providers into the next iteration of our design through hand sketching and rapid prototyping, allowing us to build out formalized user flows and a model information architecture.