Mobile Assessments
Designing a mobile-first assessment tool for psychedelic therapists and patients.
My Role
Product Design Lead — UX, UI, Interaction Design, Visual Design
Team
Will Simon, Product Lead
Eli Goodman, Engineering Lead
Samir Uppaluru, Engineering Lead
Devon Koch, Full-Stack Engineer
Ismael Ghanim, Full-Stack Engineer
Habib Rehman, Full-Stack Engineer
Timeline
2 months, Aug – Sep 2022
Overview
Homecoming started as an app that psychedelic therapists would use with their patients to support them before, during, and after sessions. A survey of 20+ current and potential customers revealed that they wanted us to support assessments.
To seal a customer deal, we had to work quickly to research, design, and develop this tool. In its first iteration, we launched a mobile-first assessment tool for patients. In the second iteration, we included an accompanying dashboard view for therapists displaying assessment result trend lines.
Impact
We gained a premium customer that is a thought leader in the space of therapeutic psychedelics. Assessments served as a key tool in our v2 product.
Context
Assessments are critical for psychedelic therapy
People who seek psychedelic therapy often suffer from crippling mental illnesses and after conventional therapy and medicines have failed. Because psychedelic therapy is still a newer, more experimental modality, assessing its efficacy is extremely important.
Problem
Unfortunately, assessments can be a pain to complete
Assessments have to be completed at timed intervals before and after the session. In our research, we learned that the process of distributing assessments and checking in on patients were highly manual.
Opportunity
We would grow our business by supporting assessments
We partnered with the Beckley Foundation, a pioneering think tank in the psychedelic research space, to identify 10 of the most relevant assessments used by psychedelic therapists. By adding these to the therapists' toolkit, we expected a higher volume of customer interest.
Research
Learning from leading survey platforms and inspired by innovative mobile apps
We analyzed survey products like Typeform and Google Forms, as well as innovative mobile apps with brilliant interaction design, like How We Feel.
Early visual designs explored different UI and visual design options, such as wider response fields, dark background colors, and radio buttons.
We experimented with several interaction movements. We explored a horizontal scroll movement, but ultimately went with a vertical scroll because it was a pattern that users were more familiar with.
Design
We time-boxed the amount of time we'd allocate to design to limit churn and ship as quickly as we could. During this time, I diverged on visual design approaches and interaction animations.
💡 Simple and conversational
Ultimately, we landed on using a simple white and neutral palette to minimize distractions from the content. As to the interactions, we chose a vertical auto-scroll interaction between questions that mimicked the conversational nature of the therapist-patient relationship.
Solution (1/2)
A simple, smooth vertically moving client assessment
The client app displays all 10 assessment types in a vertical scroll.
Solution (2/2)
A therapist dashboard that shows assessment scores and trend lines
Outcome
Beckley Foundation as a premium customer and a basis for the v2 product.
With the release of this feature, we were able to continue our partnership with Beckley Foundation, which uses Homecoming's assessments to collect data on their patient pool and conduct research on the efficacy of psychedelics for therapy.
Shortly after the release of this feature, Homecoming switched its market to general mental health and wellness practitioners. Assessments were one of the few features from the v1 app to be transferred over and has become the basis of new features like Forms, which allows practitioners to create custom assessments for their clients.