An improved ratings and review system for online therapy platforms
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Objectives
Tools
Figma, Miro
Role
UX Researcher (Competitive Analysis, Affinity Diagramming)
UX Designer (Wireframing, Visual Design, Interaction Design)
Team
Team of 4 - Eswarya Kotha, Kritika Sharma, Riddhi Chaudhari, Rashi Kanungo
with feedback from classmates and mentors
Duration
4 weeks
As an increasing number of individuals turn to online therapy platforms, the significance of ratings and reviews has grown. In the field of therapy, providing a positive experience is crucial for enhancing individuals' mental well-being and ensuring the maintenance of good mental health. However, there is currently a lack of transparency when it comes to accessing ratings and reviews of different therapy platforms.
Our objective is to establish improved communication between individuals and therapy platforms while fostering a secure and supportive environment.
We decided to start off our secondary research by looking up applications that primarily use rating and review systems in all domains. This analysis would give us some idea as to how we can move ahead with a specific domain or platform. We also wanted to dive deep into the rating and review system to understand the various ways of feedback systems and a general idea of their pros and cons.
These comparisons helped us narrow down our domain and platform for this project. We realized that reviews and rating systems hold a very important place in mental health applications. A person looking for therapy and a psychologist always checks for their previous ratings, their reviews from past patients and then makes an informed decision to go ahead with the psychologist. Ratings and reviews also especially play an important role as mental health is a very sensitive topic and needs to be dealt with with proper care and professional people. Therefore we decided to dive deeper into mental health applications that use rating and review systems and understand how they work.
Some of the applications we considered to compare were:
This comparative analysis gave us a direction in terms of choosing our target audiences and what steps needed to be taken next.
We interviewed users who have taken up therapy services and therapists who have worked on freelancing websites
With this, we have interviewed a total of three users and four psychologists for our design analysis
The key points gathered from user interviews were analyzed to design our affinity maps for both users and psychologists
User Affinity Map Insights:
Psychologist Affinity Map Insights:
With the information gathered from our users and psychologists, we have been able to come up with fictional segments that portay the collective thoughts of the users and psychologists.
1. The User Persona
2. The Psychologist Persona
With this, we've envisioned a scenario demonstrating how our application would support users in need of a positive therapy experience:
Based on the responses received from psychologists and users, we brainstormed improvements that can be made to the ratings systems by building on a new application. The three features of improvement we had come up with are:
Feature 1
The feedback form to collect ratings and reviews from the client based on the experience they had with the psychologist will not be sent out immediately. It will be sent 3 hours after the termination of the therapy session as this would give them the time to process their emotions and then provide feedback
Feature 2
Relevant prompts are introduced in the chatbot feature such that the user doesn’t have to think about the feedback but is able to provide constructive feedback. Utilizing an emoji rating scale, where the visuals of emojis make it easy for users to express the emotions they are currently dealing with. As users provide feedback for the therapist through the chatbot, they will be clearly informed that they are conversing with an automated chatbot.
Feature 3
Badges and progress bars make the user feel rewarded for the efforts taken to provide their valuable feedback. It makes them feel appreciated and hence motivates them to continue with their tasks. The rewards include providing them access to interesting topics on mental health and well-being.
With this in mind, we plan to create a therapy platform website. We observed that existing sites often restrict users by requiring them to answer questions, limiting their ability to explore and make informed decisions.
We started with sketching out the layouts of our website to showcase the ratings and reviews feature:
We then moved our design process to Figma to start with the wireframes designing all the base web pages to get an idea of how to proceed further.
The resultant paper prototypes were converted into Figma as below:
We did a usability test on the prototypes to understand whether the solutions created were understandable with the target audience. The results were as follows:
1. Self-assessment by the therapist
The therapist can assess themselves by answering some self-reflecting questions and improving their skills
2. Real-time progress tracking through milestones
Users can track their progress in real-time based on a pre-set goal map
3. Ratings and reviews from the clients will be better if they know what and how to consult to therapist based on their needs (for new users)
The website can have a guide or a consulting chatbot to help the client understand which method of therapy will be best for them based on their condition.
