Responsibilities
Volunteered to build the nonprofit site with a $200 budget. (was able to do it, but wasn’t user friendly, because of limitations of plugins)
Product storyboarding, user experience design, including user flows
Conducted the initial web development (in WordPress with 3rd party plugins)
Surveyed Providers and worked with a Developer to implement improved version
PROBLEM
Clinical and counseling graduate students are a vulnerable population
Clinical and Counseling graduate students are more likely to be depressed or anxious than the general population and not all of these students have insurance coverage that includes counseling.
SOLUTION
Connect practicing psychologists to graduate students
A directory to connect clinical and counseling graduate students with psychologists willing to see them pro bono. This is a way for practicing psychologists to give back to the profession and strengthen the next generation of psychologists.
STORYBOARDING
Identify feelings and key moments in a student’s path to connect with a psychologist.
Learning about the high stress working conditions and lack of mental health services in these graduate programs built empathy and helped me consider the emotions of a graduate student using the directory.
PERSONAS
Keep users top of mind when working through the user flows.
Based on the storyboard I identified 2 main participants. Designing for two users meant thinking about the context of each user, their pain points, frustrations, and state of mind.
USER FLOWS
A psychologist (provider) registering on the directory begins with a form. A graduate student (user) searching for a provider begins by searching from the PSPIT homepage.
Identify the steps and processes that each persona would complete.
This stage prepared me for the research on finding and selecting plugins to fit our requirements.
REQUIREMENTS + PLUGIN RESEARCH
CREATION: Wordpress + plugins
I am not a developer, so I used Creative Minds’s Business Directory Community Items & Business Directory Pro plugins. They satisfied the core functions, but were somewhat lacking in usability 😒 (more later).
SURVEY+ INTERVIEW
UNDERSTAND: Finding pain points
After running the site for six months, acquiring new providers, and connecting students to providers, I wanted to hear from a larger swath of our providers and the web admin.
I surveyed providers and interviewed the web admin to help find pain points in their flow or the processes.
ITERATE: Hiring a developer to break free of plugin limitations 🦸🏽
I got the website up and running with a $200 budget and now it was time to respond to feedback. The nonprofit board held a fundraiser to invest in the website. They contracted a developer to implement the feedback we received from the provider survey and the nonprofit board members. I met with the developer to share our requirements, user feedback, and answer his questions. After sharing a sandbox site and receiving feedback, he moved the new site into production on the Django platform.
Survey trends showed providers call for a clearer calls to action for common tasks (e.g. updating availability & resetting password).
What I learned + what I would do differently
Understand my limitations. Again, I am not a developer.
Sure, the initial plugins worked, but did not meet users’ expectations and I knew this on some level. 🤦 For example, people expect to be able to reset their password. This is TOTALLY reasonable. After the Wordpress site launched with the plugins, I spent more time scanning the landscape for better plugins and ended up testing one from Crocoblock in early 2022, a software company based out of Ukraine, which meant communication with plugin staff was (understandably) not optimal. My time could have been better spent.
Outsource so I can spend more time and focus more on UX. Based on my experience, I’d have asked the nonprofit board to start fundraising earlier and would have begun talks with a developer at the beginning. This would have given me more time to focus on UX.
I learned a lot about processes and planning by playing a junior developer in the beginning. The handoff to a developer to see our improvements come to life was satisfying. It was exciting and rewarding to be a part of this nonprofit.