Summary

Cerebral is an online mental healthcare platform & mobile application that provides immediate access to therapy, care counseling and medication through live video-chat visits & chat sessions.

While Cerebral offers these convenient services, there was a desire to give patients more autonomous care outside of video or chat sessions. Cerebral wanted to incorporate Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT exercises to their mobile app. CBT is a psycho-social intervention that is administered through activities such as journaling, meditating, breathing, and getting in touch with your senses. This is intended to improve emotional regulation, and helps people develop personal coping strategies.

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Duration

6 weeks

Problem

Patients are being forwarded to outside resources or applications for CBT exercises, which reduces direct engagement to the mobile app or platform.

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Solution

Implement a CBT exercise feature within the mobile application, which will include specific activities such as journaling, breathing, reading, and meditation in order to increase retention and patient engagement with the mobile app.

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Approach

The care counselor leads and content strategist generated the type of exercises to be offered in the first release of this project.

Myself, the product managers and engineers identified areas of need, and brainstormed for:

• Content structure (lo-fi wireframes)
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• Feature offerings
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• Accommodating constraints (budget & a tight deadline)
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• User flows for the patient & clinician experience
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• Competitor/comparator app offerings

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Project Goals

1. Increase patient engagement by providing exercises and activities for patients to complete outside of appointments (reduce churn and increase retention with the app)

2. Design and develop a sustainable content library for CBT exercises that can accommodate new exercises in the future

3. Design and develop design interactions for three different types of exercises, while adhering engineering constraints and business budget

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Design Hypothesis

By implementing a CBT exercise feature within the mobile application, with specific activities such as journaling, breathing, reading, and meditation, this will increase retention and patient engagement with the mobile app by providing additional tools and resources aside from clinician chats or visits.

We will know this to be true through qualitative data (positive reviews and feedback from patients), and by seeing an increase in app engagement percentage (specific to the feature).

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Design Outcomes

Content Library & Organization

• Information Architecture - Planned and organized how exercise content will be shown
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• Primary Navigation - designed a new icon (brain) for the primary navigation
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• New secondary & tertiary navigation- established sections for CBT exercises: Assigned, Discover (with exercise types beneath) & History
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• Graphics & Visuals - Created and maintained a repository of vector images and graphics, adapting to brand guidelines

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Exercises

• Interaction - designed a scalable content structure for different CBT activity types

• UI Design - designed minor animations, graphics & visuals (breathing widget)
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Assignments

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• Patient experience: Quick access to exercises through chat, Abraham-Hicks Emotional Guidance Scale

• Admin/Clinician Experience (not pictured): Designed a back-end system for clinicians to assign exercises
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Results

• Quantitative data on the feature's impact - 20% of patients are actively using this feature

• Receiving more qualitative feedback from patients - positive reviews

• Planned for further iterations and additions