Mental Health Assessments

🔑 Key Impacts

• Increased patient engagement by helping users track mental health progress across visits
• Improved patient understanding of assessments through clearer, less clinical UX patterns
• Strengthened continuity between patients and providers within virtual care experiences
• 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 made it difficult for patients to feel continuity across ongoing care sessions.

“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. As the sole designer on the project, I owned the experience end-to-end across workflow mapping, responsive UI design, testing, and engineering collaboration.

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:

• Designing structured assessment workflows that balanced accessibility, clarity, and emotional sensitivity
• 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 worked closely with engineering to ensure the experience remained scalable across web and mobile platforms while fitting within existing MDLIVE workflows and technical constraints.

🔍 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 improved patient confidence, reduced confusion, and created a more approachable assessment experience.

📈 Outcomes

• Patients gained a clear, visual way to track their mental health progress
• Providers were able to access consistent, structured evaluation data
• Created a clearer and more supportive assessment experience that reinforced continuity between visits
• Enabled follow-up scheduling and future care planning through built-in CTAs

🧭 Reflection

This project highlighted the impact of thoughtful product design within a sensitive and emotionally complex healthcare 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 continuity of care and long-term patient engagement.

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.