Destigmatizing Mental Health and Creating Community Among Female Physicians
In a three-week design sprint, I worked on a team of three alongside a client to improve her website.
THE CHALLENGE
Doctors Under the Radar is an online community of female physicians aiming to focus on mental health and making sure they can identify problems and get the help they need. Our client’s main goal was to redesign the website to make it more user-friendly.
MY ROLE
Research Lead, UX Designer
TEAM
Daniel Kim — Project Lead, UX Designer
Jessica Martinez — Interactions Lead, UX Designer
TOOLS USED
Miro
Usertesting.com
Optimal Workshop
Figma
OUR CLIENT
Doctors Under the Radar is an online community for female physicians where they can connect with other female physicians and with mental health professionals tailored to their needs to be a source of reference for healing.
It is also a library of resources for healthcare professionals. From burnout to wellness to Black Lives Matter, there are hundreds of resources for users to utilize.
Lastly, it is a podcast and blog where they have open conversations with other healthcare professionals sharing their stories surrounding mental health.
Doctors Under the Radar aims to increase mental health awareness, maintain confidentiality, and most importantly, decrease the stigmas attached to mental health among female physicians.
RESEARCH & TESTING
After finding out who our client would be, our team began learning about Doctors Under the Radar by reviewing the website.
Not wanting to get ahead of ourselves, we began doing a competitive analysis until we were able to meet with our client and hear about their goals for the sprint. We looked at three different websites:
Not One More Vet (https://www.nomv.org) — an organization providing support to veterinary teams struggling with their mental health.
MentalHappy (https://www.mentalhappy.com/) — a social network to talk about mental health and improve users’ emotional wellbeing.
Modern Health (https://www.joinmodernhealth.com/) — a service dedicated to breaking down barriers to access mental health resources and providing everyone with the resources they need to engage in their mental health.
We found that what we typically liked on these websites was when they had a clear mission, a personal feel, and good content flow.
After getting a better understanding of some similar websites, we were able to meet with our client and set our project scope. Our client’s main goal was to make the website more user-friendly.
We began doing research on the current website, including a SWOT Analysis and a Heuristics Evaluation using the LEMErS method to identify areas for improvement.
- Learnability: 3
Overall we found that the site functions like a normal site. The login is in the top right corner, the navigation bar works as expected, and the buttons are brightly colored attracting the user to them, which is what we want. However, many of the buttons are different colors without a clear reason why or have confusing text.
- Efficiency: 3
While there was feedback for button clicks and hover states, it was inconsistent. Phrases such as Phenomenal Physicians and Memorable Mentions while descriptive are not as clear as Join the Team. The user has to think more about what each title means instead of understanding at first glance.
- Memorability: 2
Memorability was only a minor issue as the site itself is very straightforward. Our main concerns with memorability are that some inconsistencies and the number of options can make the site harder to remember.
- Error Management: 2
We found that it was pretty difficult to make a mistake on the site. The main area where we noticed a hiccup in error management is on the sign in page. If you don’t have an account, it doesn’t tell you what the problem is, it simply tells you there is a problem. Another minor issue we noticed was that unless the site opens the Mighty Networks page on a new tab, there is no link to get back to the Doctors Under the Radar website. It could have just been a browser setting that caused this to be an issue, but it could also cause confusion.
- Satisfaction: 4
After spending time looking around the site, we found that there is a lot of important and helpful information, but the visual design causes it to be overwhelming and hard to digest.
We found that Memorability and Error Management weren’t high priority, but Satisfaction was something that would need a lot of work over the next few weeks.
Next, we conducted a content audit to have a better understanding of what information was currently on each page.
Once we had a better idea of what each page consisted of, we conducted our first round of usability tests. We wanted to test the functionality of the current Doctors Under the Radar website, so we set up an unmoderated usability test on UserTesting.com. We had three participants that were in or close to our target audience. Users were given a scenario and five tasks, and we found that only three of the tasks were successfully completed by at least 2/3 users.
In addition to the usability tests, we also conducted a card sort to see how participants would group different page titles compared to how the current global nav is organized.
SYNTHESIS
Our team took our findings from the usability tests and card sort and began to synthesize them to pull out key insights.
Through our usability tests, we learned that while the imagery gave a good sense of what the website was about, there was a lot of information without much prioritization. Overall, we found that the site flow wasn’t ideal. Our card sort showed us that participants were confused by ambiguous page titles. We wanted to make sure it was clear to users what Doctors Under the Radar does while making it easy for them to find what they need.
We also took the user information we had and began developing three personas and a proto-persona.
After reviewing the results from our tests, we were able to look back at our scope and form a problem statement and hypothesis.
PROBLEM
We believe that female physicians need a better way to easily and efficiently find resources and services on the Doctors Under the Radar website because the abundance of information is overwhelming and makes the website difficult to navigate.
How might we better present the services and resources that Doctors Under the Radar offer so female physicians can access them easier?
We believe that prioritizing information and establishing consistency in our UI will result in a more user-friendly website. We will know this to be true when we receive feedback that users can confidently find the services or resources they need.
IDEATION & DESIGN & TESTING (OH MY)
Our team took this information and began moving into the design phase. We ideated and created a new sitemap that simplified the website. We restructured the global nav based on our card sort and content audit and limited the number of pages in each section. From there, we created user flows and began sketching our pages.
With our sketches complete, we began moving them into Figma to create wireframes that we would later turn into our prototype. Our main goal was to get an idea of the content that would be on each page and establish a good page flow.
As we finished up our wireframes, we started to fill in the placeholders with some content. Once there was enough text to figure out what the site was, we conducted a second usability test on our mid-fidelity prototype and a card sort. Our usability test participants found our prototype to be user-friendly, and, with the exception of two cards, our card sort validated our new global nav.
With positive feedback from our second round of usability tests, we began sourcing images, cleaning up our layout, and refining our content to move our prototype to high fidelity. We then conducted a third round of usability tests.
In an attempt to better measure our results, we used the same usability test questions for all three rounds, with one minor change between rounds 1 and 2. What we didn’t realize was that the phrasing on one question would end up causing confusion in our third round of testing. Despite the confusion, our test participants still found the site to be user-friendly and two mentioned that they liked the imagery.
As we came to the end of our sprint, we made some iterations based on our third round of usability tests and began polishing our prototype. We added a gradient background to our pages to give the website a warmer feel and better reflect the mission of Doctors Under the Radar.
We updated our style guide to reflect the changes made in our final prototype and were able to hand everything off to a happy client.