Elyza Brillantes | SonderMind

Introduction

SonderMind's mission is to redesign behavioral health to become more accessible, approachable, and utilized.

Problem

As a behavioral health provider on SonderMind’s network, you have access to their portal and platform to receive client referrals and submit billing / insurance claims for processing.

The current portal is minimally designed and hasn't been brought up to speed with the same branding and UI as their client facing site. After meeting with Brad Webb, SonderMind's VP of Product, we established three business goals to guide our project:
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• Increase provider engagement with their portal
• Decrease referral response and claim submission times
• Reduce training times and follow up questions, allowing them to scale quickly

Solution

Working with their product team, my team simplified the portal's learnability and usability, as well as applying their unique branding and style to maintain a cohesive voice throughout the provider experience.

Team

As project manager, I managed our deadlines, organized our tools and assets, as well as maintained client communication. I also took the lead on UI design, ensuring the screens designed by three separate designers maintained brand consistency and used the same design components and styles.

My teammates, Colleen and Skylair, contributed invaluable insight given their background experience in behavioral health and took the lead on user interviews, competitive research, as well as

Timeline

3 weeks

Role

Project Manager
Lead UI Designer
Researcher

Team

Colleen Keegan, Skylair Hilton

Tools

Research

One of our biggest challenges was a quick turn around: with just three weeks, how do we ensure we have a thorough understanding of our user and business needs?

We were only able to interview one SonderMind provider within this time frame, so we called on non-SonderMind providers, as well as the team's provider training lead, to help us understand the motivations, frustrations, and goals of the general mental health professional.

Methods

Heuristic Evaluation
User + Expert Interviews
Competitive Analysis
Journey Maps
Personas

1

SonderMind Provider

5

Non-SonderMind Providers

1

SonderMind Training Lead

Evaluating the current portal's usability.

We performed a heuristic evaluation to take stock of the functionality and existing usability of the provider portal and identify the biggest opportunities for our project.

There were three core functionalities of the provider portal that needed to remain: receiving and accepting new client referrals, scheduling appointments, and submitting claims for billing.

After evaluating, we landed on four key heuristics that we wanted to focus on:

Visibility of system status

The process of accepting / declining referrals is complex and it isn't always clear what the next step of the process was. Improving the visibility of next steps and system statuses could help increase learnability and ensure that SonderMind could scale their provider base quickly and efficiently.

Consistency and standards

Terminology differed slightly from one area of the platform to another, preventing easy learnability. Before we had the chance to chat with SonderMind's provider training lead, we took a first pass at using the platform as a brand new user, but struggled to understand exactly what some buttons or sections were for.

Flexibility and efficiency of use

The user flows for the three core functions of the portal often times were difficult to navigate. We wanted to improve the site's information architecture to make accessing core functions dead simple and give providers access to the info they needed, where they expected it.

Aesthetic and minimalist design

Our stakeholders acknowledged that the portal was designed primarily for functionality; it didn't carry over any of the brand vision that was present throughout the client facing site. SonderMind's brand was a unique offering that we felt could be leveraged in making the portal a delight for providers to use.

Ideation

We set out to tackle three key opportunities:

• How might we make claim submissions simpler and easier?
• How might we make the referral accept / decline process easier to understand?
• How might we make the portal more integrated into a provider's process?
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After performing a few design studios to generate ideas, we designed a few quick wireframes and presented to the SonderMind team. I focused on the Claims and Referrals features as I was most interested in how a cleaner UI could provide a more learnable and intuitive experience.

Methods

Design studio
Wireframing
Design review

Claims List + Submission Form

Ultimately we wanted to reduce the number of clicks / inputs needed to submit a claim. We envisioned the bulk of the content on the form auto-generating from previous claims, including the required diagnostic and treatment codes. All a provider would need to do is enter their clinical notes from the specific session and submit.
I reduced the claims list from several tabs to one list with system statuses indicating to providers what action was needed, if any.
SonderMind Feedback: Not surprisingly, insurance is the biggest pain point for the team here. There was a lot of nuance in the process that necessitated a lot of the complex statuses that the portal showed and I oversimplified the list view to the point where we missed out on some of the edge cases.

Our stakeholders challenged us to take a closer look at how we surfaced information that providers needed, but they responded positively to the UI changes we made to diagnostic + treatment code input on the form.

Referrals

I created a statusing system that would have clearer CTAs for the provider to follow when accepting or declining new clients. By using conversational language to guide the provider to the next step, it would make it easier to learn.
SonderMind Feedback: The team let us know that they were actually mostly concerned here around the copy / overall treatment of new clients — the term "referral" can be a loaded word in the industry and SonderMind wanted to emphasize that they weren't necessarily just a client / provider matching service, and that this was about creating real relationships between people.

Our next task for referrals would be to figure out how to align the business goal of having therapists quickly accept new clients they've been matched with with the end goal of remaining sensitive to the nature of mental health care.

Final Mock Ups: Claims

Automate where possible.

Currently, providers need to create a new claim after each appointment. By auto-generating claims based on calendar, this would cut one step out of the process.
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Providers also told us that the details required on the submission forms typically doesn’t change from appointment to appointment.

We recommended that all fields auto-filled based on the last claim, with an option to edit as needed.

Visibility for payment updates.

One of the leading causes of processing errors was when a client's information was incorrect.
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We did not want to place the burden of checking information solely on the provider, but also knew that we didn't want the patient to feel annoyed by constant reminders to update their information...

...so we introduced an SMS based check in / notification that would mirror many common SMS notifications used by doctor's offices. If the client confirms that no changes have been made, this would reflect on the provider's side.

As a next steps, we'd love to explore the whole eco-system of client / provider interactions to identify more ways to use e-mail and SMS to help streamline the billing process.

Final Mock Ups: Matches (neé Referrals)

Humanizing "referrals."

Currently, providers review referrals in a list format. I chose to use a card layout to allow for greater text hierarchy within the information presented.

I highlighted the client's name in a larger typeface and re-ordered the information a provider would need to determine if they are a good match for their needs.

The CTAs became more conversational, helping new providers quickly learn what they needed to do next in order to accept or decline a referral.

Client Feedback + Learnings

When your product has two users, you need to understand both ends of the process.
SonderMind services two users: clients seeking therapy and therapy providers. Coming from an operations background, I'd be eager to take a look at the whole eco-system and study where client / provider experiences intersected. I think there's a large opportunity to utilize thoughtful and well designed notifications throughout to help guide both client and providers through a satisfying experience.
Choosing the right CTAs shapes experiences and learnability.
SonderMind said that there was still work to be done to hone in on the right phrasing for the "referrals" process, but they remarked how the card format did a good job of emphasizing each client's unique qualities. The team also felt that the revised button CTAs felt clearer and easier to understand.
Research can help you ask the right questions.
The SonderMind team mentioned that, given our limited time frame and user interview constraints, we raised some good concerns and questions around the UI and processes, giving them some action items to continue to tackle as they re-design their portal. In particular for myself, performing the heuristic evaluation helped me to understand the larger usability issues and needs before moving into solutions.