Mental Health Assessments

🔑 Key Impacts

• Increased patient engagement by helping users track mental health progress across visits
• Improved clarity and usability of clinical assessments through user-informed design
• Strengthened provider–patient connection in a virtual setting
• Built scalable flows for both mobile and web platforms
• Laid groundwork for future behavioral health features and post-visit continuity tools

🎯 Objectives

• Design and integrate a mental health assessment feature into the MDLIVE platform for tracking progress over time
• Enhance continuity of care and patient understanding through clear evaluation summaries
• Incorporate clinical and patient feedback to ensure relevance and usability
• Expand behavioral health offerings and support long-term patient engagement
• Deliver phased, cross-platform rollout with full engineering collaboration

🔍 Understanding the Problem

While MDLIVE offered strong virtual mental health services, many patients struggled to feel a continuous connection with their care providers. Feedback revealed a lack of clarity around progress across sessions, which led to disconnection and drop-off.

“Some people mention that scheduling ongoing appointments with the same therapist can be something of a challenge.” – Healthline

To solve this, we aimed to create a feature that would allow:

• Providers to evaluate progress using structured, repeatable assessments
• Patients to track their own progress in a way that felt clear, motivating, and actionable

🔄 Aligning on a Direction

I began with competitor and landscape research to understand how other platforms handled behavioral health tracking. From there, I collaborated with product, clinical, and engineering stakeholders to align on goals and define success.

We identified key priorities:

• Inconsistent scheduling components and UI patterns caused confusion
• Accessibility gaps needed resolution across platforms
• The new feature had to tie into existing workflows, including checkout and post-visit flows

🛠 Design & Implementation

I led a phased approach, starting with low-fidelity user flows that mapped the assessment journey. This included:

• Presenting assessment options in an accessible and simple interface
• Connecting the feature to both scheduling and follow-up flows
• Designing for both web and mobile, ensuring responsive and consistent layouts

Key design elements included:

• Instructional screens before assessments to reduce anxiety
• Clear, friendly language to explain scoring and outcomes
• CTAs guiding patients to schedule another visit or review progress

I collaborated with engineering to ensure all designs were feasible and scalable, and provided detailed documentation for handoff.

🔍 User Testing & Iteration

Using feedback from patients and internal reviewers, I tested and refined the flow through several design rounds.

Top usability issues and solutions:

• Problem: Patients didn’t understand the purpose of assessments

→ Solution: Added clear instructional screens before each assessment

• Problem: Result pages were confusing and overly clinical

→ Solution: Refocused on clear summaries and next steps, de-emphasizing numerical scoring

These iterations greatly improved patient confidence and ease of use.

📈 Outcomes

• Patients gained a clear, visual way to track their mental health progress
• Providers were able to access consistent, structured evaluation data
• Improved user satisfaction with virtual mental health services
• Enabled follow-up scheduling and future care planning through built-in CTAs

🧭 Reflection

This project highlighted the impact of thoughtful UX in a sensitive, complex space like mental health. It was a strong example of aligning cross-functional teams—design, clinical, product, and engineering—around a shared goal of supporting patient progress.

This project helped bring more structure to virtual patient-provider relationships in a way that felt more supportive and human.

I’m proud to have led a project that delivered value to both patients and providers, while reinforcing MDLIVE’s mission of accessible, high-quality virtual care.