MatchMind: Uniting students who need therapy with beginning therapists who need patients

12 min readOct 24, 2021

How do we used UX Design to connect patients and therapists in virtual sessions with the best cost & benefit and safety for both sides?

This is a translation of my original article in portuguese, please bare in mind our research was applied on a Brazilian scope, some source links and images may not be translated

Seven out of ten students from federal institutions of higher education in Brazil suffer some type of mental or emotional difficulty such as stress, anxiety or depression. 86% of medical students show symptoms of anxiety. Master’s and doctoral students are six times more likely to suffer anxiety and depression than the general population. On one hand, we have a scenario of students on the verge of a nervous breakdown who need professional help, but are faced with the high cost of doing therapy and the difficulty of finding therapists who fit their profile.

Why depression and anxiety affect more and more college students?

Anxiety and Depression Affect Medical Students

On the other hand, we have 9 out of 10 psychologists who have just graduated, are beginning their careers or even with more than 2 years of experience, who suffer to complete their schedules with patients, mainly because they do not know how to sell themselves (Something that universities do not teach) and with this, end up losing space to coaching professionals, who already have marketing in their DNA. Research indicates that 42% of psychologists work on their own, but without enough patients, 85% of them cannot afford an office.

“Coach Wave” is targeted by the federal council of psychology

How can we support these two sides, with such complementary needs?

Our Goal and Challenge

Create solutions to connect university students who are experiencing a period of pressure and need to do therapy with affordable prices, to therapists with available hours and who need patients.

Build a platform for patients and therapists to register their characteristics, connect the parties and enable virtual therapeutic sessions in a safe and viable way on both sides, with the goal of generating combinations of up to 50% of registered users within 6 months after the launch of the platform*.
*For lack of a baseline, we will periodically review these goals and metrics.

We then employed a variety of UX discovery tools with the help of MIRO to identify our value proposition, contact channels, partners, resources, relationships and thus began our growth journey.

Personas

In order to create empathy and understand the main pains of users, we developed the profile of a student to be the patient and the profile of a newly graduated therapist based on our qualitative and quantitative research and the user/client journey we will cite later in this article.
In this way, we were able to materialize people and see solutions that really transform their lives within the proposal.

Fernanda, the depressed student

Fernanda’s Context

Fernanda has felt the need for therapy for some time. She was unmotivated, unhappy and stressed with the pressure she was suffering from work and study, until she triggered a panic attack in the middle of the classroom.
That was the breaking point for her to start looking for professional help, but her first hurdle was finding help in her neighborhood that is far from the city center. She even managed to get a session with a local therapist, but he didn’t have a compatible schedule, and his care was a fortune for her current reality.
A friend of hers recommended a more affordable therapist in another area of the city, but she barely had time to fulfill her current commitments, it was out of the question to have to take two hours of traffic to attend an hour of session.
Searching for alternatives on the internet, she found MatchMind, a platform for therapists who practice virtual sessions. There she placed her needs and choose from a series of options of therapies, therapists, prices and schedules that matched her profile.
Today, she feels much safer and happier with the sessions she attends to, without leaving home and without anyone knowing about it, using only an hour of her day and with the guarantee that payments occur digitally and securely on the platform itself. She’s even gotten used to her therapist’s accent!

Guilherme, The available therapist

Guilherme’s Context

Guilherme was always the diligent kind of student who studied everything related to his great passion: psychology. He couldn’t wait to graduate so he could alleviate the sufferings of people who needed help.
After receiving his diploma, Guilherme realized that in practice, things were very different. Setting up an office was expensive, getting patients was difficult, and client default was common.
“How am I going to build experience and practice my passion in this unfavorable scenario?” With this question in mind, he began to look for alternatives: He publicized his services on his social networks, but the few interested people he got didn’t want to go to his house far from the city center.

He tried to use a shared office, but when he got a patient, the office restricted schedule didn’t match the patient’s. The solution then would be to conduct virtual sessions on hir own, but he soon realized that the default was much greater in virtual sessions than in-person sessions.

Seeking solutions to avoid the default he found MatchMind, a platform for therapists to practice virtual sessions with patients from all over Brazil in a safe and guaranteed way.
In addition to solving the problem of defaults, he managed to fill all his schedules, he is attending to various pathological profiles and did not even need to open an office. All it took was a painting in his room, a new armchair and good lighting.

True time! Validating Assumptions with Quantitative & Qualitative Research

After all our limited knowledge about the subject was stressed, we started to carry out our qualitative research with two conditional questionnaires to be answered by the two personas respectively.
Using different social networks, we launched our research in several specific groups of students and therapists throughout Brazil and after a period of feedback, we were able to perform a quantitative analysis to validate some of our hypotheses:

Completed the quantitative research, we were able to focus on the doubts that could only be resolved in the qualitative research interviews. Thus, from the 44 students and 31 therapists who answered the qualitative research questions, we selected 4 students and 6 therapists to carry out a more detailed interview where we found many new learnings and peculiarities.

Our greatest learnings from students

For them the therapist’s age or experience doesn’t matter much. For the interviewees, what really matters is having a connection, having a good connection with the therapist.

In addition to the cost being high, for the vast majority of respondents, the effort and time required to go to the consultation site are the most negative points of doing face-to-face therapy.

Privacy, on the other hand, was one of the most mentioned negative points about the online therapy. Some interviewees reported playing music in the background or atending online sessions inside their cars for sound isolation.

It is not a taboo to say that you are doing therapy to friends or family.

Another negative factor reported for the online sessions would be the connection problems and program crashes that affect the fluidity of the therapy. As a result, text or audio messaging sessions are becoming more and more common.

In general, online sessions are better due to cost and transportation effefort, both essential items in a period of isolation and loss of income, but they conssider important that face-to-face sessions be held esporadicaly.

Our greatest learnings from therapists.

All professionals interviewed said they had difficulties selling themselves.

They didn’t learn marketing in college and found themselves facing a market that demands it in order to grow! As a result, they are losing market share to holistic therapists or coaching professionals.

All therapists also reported that they only get patients through referrals from their network, and their investments in marketing on social media proved to be very inefficient, further proofing of the lack of marketing knowledge.

Becoming a terapist, and keeping up with the suties after, requires a big invetment. Adding to that the cost to mantain an office, it is very difficult to recover the entire investment in the medium term.

Patients can’t see the amount of investment that a good therapist makes and, consequently, they can’t understand that the terapy price is fair.

Demanding a contract and payment in advance from the patients it’s not harmful, on the contrary, it makes the patients more loyal!

Maintaining an office at the beginning of their career is not sustainable, for all interviewees. Online therapy alowed them to to offer more affordable prices, they are reducing fixed costs and avoiding investments in office or transportation.

They also pointed out the resistance that their category has with innovation and technology, but that this is being partially broken by the need that the pandemic imposed on everyone. Online terapy is here to stay.

With these feedbacks, we were able to identify which assumptions and hypotheses were right and which were wrong and this brought us a greater safety margin!

Benchmarking

Assured that we understood the needs of our personas, we started a market research to analyze how our competition behaves. Understand their positive and negative points, analyze the main complaints of their users and, in this way, try to overcome them to go further, with even more innovative solutions. We have selected below, the list with the most relevant competitors in our research:

We identified that no platform offers validation from both sides: patient and therapist. This item is essential for both sides to have proof of the session that took place in any case of dispute.

Although some competitors use videos on therapist profiles, we have decided that a cover video is mandatory on the therapist profile because in our research we have confirmed that video is a decisive element in gaining client’s trust. Consequently, we might have greater engagement on our product!

Another difference was to retain the payment made by the patient and deliver it to the therapist only after confirmations, reducing the risk of scams or fraud. The therapist can also offer the 1st session free of charge, making the patient more comfortable and open to testing.

Finally, we provide a blog where the therapists themselves post articles. A way to diversify our subjects and give visibility and higher rankings to the therapists who make the most effort to help, not just within their sessions.

Clients’ Journeys

Based on the previously obtained knowledge, we developed the journeys for each persona where we were able to map all the steps that each one goes through, understanding the contact points of the persona with our product and thus identifing possible opportunities and ideas for the best improvement in the user experience in our platform.

User flows

After creating an impact & effort matrix to understand what would be most worth doing for the minimum viable product (MVP) launch, we moved on to creating user flows.

And finally we started sketching our product to life!

With defined flows, we had everything in hand to start drawing the first sketches. We revisited all the steps in the process and then applied the Crazy 8’s technique to finally start sketching.

After the sketching process, we created the Wireframes and then to the medium fidelity prototype

Design System

We performed user testing with the mid-fidelity prototype with the target audience, we made adjustments according to the feedback we received.

All ajustments done create all the interface elements using Figma. From the name and logo studies, as well as the color palette (we defined a neutral color for both profiles, a color for everything related to the Therapist and another color for everything related to the Patient), typographies, the different buttons for every moment of the action, icons, form fields… All documented and elaborated in a scalable and reusable style guide, facilitating the implementation of new features with consistent apearence.

High Fidelity Prototype

After user testing, mid-fidelity prototype consolidation, style guide creation, we finally created our high-fidelity prototype

Next steps

Mission Accomplished! Not completely! A project can have an end, but a product never has an end as long as it can be useful and generate interest to the user, so we know that a lot can still be improved…
Every case comclusion brings us a huge amount of learning and reinforces previous learnings. In this one, we were able to prove that:

UX Design plays a fundamental role in an accurate maturation process in a project. Without it, the risks of problems are much greater.

Each step must have a delivery to the end user that can test and validate our work and this can make all the difference between a failure or a success

Many things can and must be constantly improved

We must always be open to listening to others. The support of Leandro Rezende * and his team was fundamental for this great and rich journey.

In addition to wearing the shoes of the personas, it also brings us a wealth of insights and opportunities that only add even more value to the UX by making us stand out from the competition.
We deliver here a minimal viable product, but our icebox is full of ideas, ready to be developed. So what’s the next step?
We are immensely grateful to you, our reader who has come this far. And if you want to go further, leave your comment! You may have already noticed that we love receiving feedback!

Want to talk to us? We are available to connect with you!

It is worth noting that the entire team worked on all the processes and evolution of the project, collaboratively, on the UX tools and methodologies.