What if...we make the time outside of the therapy useful?
The client can update the therapist daily and the therapist can efficiently use the information to adjust the therapy accordingly.
Inefficiency in the 98% of time outside therapy
In a typical psychological treatment, clients spend 2% of time with the therapist and 98% of time on their own, it is extremely hard for the therapist to effectively monitor the client's real-time treatment progress outside the therapy. My interview with 6 therapists and 10 clients confirmed my observation.
And design an app that
works for both therapist and client
The therapist's role is more complicated compared to the client. I summarized their main tasks and designed the essential functions.
For the client, I only include essential functions so they are not overwhelmed. Clients can keep track of their homework, look at their progress report and have access to emergency information.
Now Kelly can manage her clients easily. She can assign them homework, check whether they have completed their homework and set up automatic reminders for her clients to complete their homework on time.
Kelly can also easily add new assessments to her library, or if she cannot find any, build a new one. Mend also uses a reward system to incentivize the user: if you create a new measure and make it public, then you can use one for free.
Kelly can also look at reports of her clients in real time whenever she wants to check in on a client. Mend automatically flags dangerous signals in assessments as well as dangerous keywords in text-entry assessments so Kelly can quickly know where to pay attention first.
The fine details matter
Make content location consistent
Our users are mainly therapists. Based on my interview, most of the therapist are still stuck in the pen-and-paper era. Therefore, it is important to make navigation within the app easy. I designed the content to follow some application layouts that they are familiar with (such as word's top function bars), so they never have to worry about where to find certain content.
Make important information readily available
The client page displays the most important information that defines the usefulness of Mend at first glance: whether the user has been sticking to the treatment. It organizes information in the most intuitive manner for the therapist.
Considering what's special about the user population
Homework in psychotherapy are very standardized as most of the measures are validated through countless studies and cannot be modified. Therefore, creating a library that consists the pre-made homework can save a lot of the time for the therapist. When finding homework, as therapists know their measures very well, and there are rarely measures with the same name, it is only necessary to display to them essential information to identify the measures that they need.
