MyTherapist is a personal user experience design project developed during my course at CareerFoundry in 2020. The tools that I used for this project were: Sketch, Balsamiq and Invision.

The briefing was to develop an app in which a user could access online experts at any time and place. My idea was to base MyTherapist on the online therapy apps already in the market. Still, in the research phase of this project, I found out that the online therapy app model has a structural flaw, and my problem to be solved became:

• How to support the client and therapist bond needed for the therapeutic relationship in an online setting.

• How to develop an online therapy model that has the quality of service and professionals as a principle.

I used both user-centered design and design thinking processes to develop this project by defining clear steps and iterating with users and peers during all processes.

In this case, the Inspiration phase started on the problem definition, the Ideation with creating the personas, and the Implementation with prototyping.

To understand online therapy's environment, I did a competitive analysis by identifying the most important apps on search engine results. I discovered that:

• This is a ten-year-old market, and the most influential apps in it are Talkspace and BetterHelp.

• In general, these apps have grown over the years by investing in marketing and research to prove this model's quality.

• They also have been suffering over the years in and out because of the quality of the service.

• This model's advantage is that they are cheaper than in-person therapy, which is not always covered by insurance.

I also did a content auditing on Talkspace website and discovered that the blog is a big part of their Search Engine Optimization strategy. They also invest in specific landing pages focusing on different user journey strategies and research to support online therapy.

To understand our target public's relationship with therapy, I interviewed 31 people, mostly millennials (between 24 to 39 years old in 2020) in a diverse group: people not doing therapy, doing in-person therapy, doing online therapy using different tools, an online therapist and an online and in-person therapist. In the survey:

• Most of the interviewed were not doing online therapy but consider doing at some point in their lives. For them, the essential aspect of an online therapy app is security.

• For the ones that are doing therapy, the most important element was fitting with the right therapist.

"It would be nice if you had more say over who your therapist is. They kind of choose for you after you answer a few questions. But that doesn't really help much since therapists usually say they specialize in everything so they can reach the most amount of people.”

I found out that online therapy is not the same as in-person therapy. While in-person therapy can be expensive and inconvenient, online therapy can be more challenging to create a client-therapist bound.

Online therapy apps are focused on the final client and not so much on the therapists. The professionals have to keep a quota, even if the apps are a sidekick for them, disturbing these professional's routines and leading them to leave the app and current clients.

Based on the research, I focused the findings on two personas: 

• Elizabeth Wilson is a therapist juggling between attending her patients and keeping her business, including marketing, accounting, schedule, maintaining an office, and others.

• Li Wei is the client, a busy nurse and soon-to-be mom. She is on bed rest, and she wants to keep working on important personal issues while she still has time before the baby is born.

I develop journey maps for each persona as a narrative document to keep empathizing with users and visualize processes a user goes through to accomplish a goal.

I created user flows to focus on the flows and not on individual screens, aiming to make the design user-centered and discover any needed pages to achieve user goals.

I did this project with a mobile-first design and a responsive web design approach to focus on the essential and adapt the content for any screen.

For the sitemap, I planned three content groups: the website homepage and both therapist and patient homepage after login. I also used card sorting - a participatory design method - to evaluate and generate ideas for sitemap development.

I did moderate remote usability tests, and the goals for this phase were:

• Check if the app had easy navigation

• Check if it was clear for the user the goal of each functionality

• Check is the user considered using all the features

I tested the app with six participants who already used other therapy apps and people in different stages of familiarity with technology and diverse demographics. I also created an A/B preference testing to evaluate different screen versions tested with UX designer peers.

In the beginning, the focus on the login screen was the secondary’s options to log in. Over the iteration, it became clear the importance of presenting the brand in the login, and the different elements to add accessibility to this page.

Initially, the home would have elements that would change as the user needed to take actions (schedule a call, make notes). The iteration showed that features shouldn't change places and that the home screen could be less crowded, focusing on the app's most important actions.

Although MyTherapist has no focus on online chatting, because it can lead to anxiety about receiving a response; I created this feature.

I tried other formats of sending messages during my tests, and the chat format seems to be the best format for accessibility.

Initially, I made the session call function like a video call on Facetime, Zoom, or Skype. In the iteration process I discovered that users would benefit from a waiting room where they can enter only when ready, and that's why I created a confirmation button after entering the call.

I defined the tone of voice and language, typography, color, components, images, illustrations, icons, grid, and accessibility orientations based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).