Counseling tracking system
Co-designed a mental health counseling tracking system for military service members.
Project details
UX Designer
10 months
Design Tasks
User flows
Information architecture
Lo-fi and hi-fi comps
Prototyping
Project Team
1 Design Lead
2 UX Designers
4 Product Managers
6 Developers
2 QA
1 Product Owner
6 Sub-Contractor POC’s
Design Systems
Sketch
Abstract
Figma
Background
The Military and Family Life Counseling Program (MFLC) is responsible for supporting service members and their families with non-medical counseling across the globe. Counselors are specifically trained to work within the military community, they deliver face-to-face counseling services, briefings and presentations to the military community.
The Problem
The Department of Defense developed the Military and Family Life (MFLC) Program in 2004 to help facilitate confidential non-medical counseling services for military personnel. Critical to the delivery of the MFLC Program is the ability to collect, aggregate, and display data for Counselors and the Government.
The Constraints
No client direction on requirements
Focus on Salesforce out of box components
Did not have access to user groups to conduct dedicated research
Designing for both desktop and tablet
Partnered with another contractor
The Goal
Increase mental health counseling for military personnel and their families by improving the existing process.
Create a robust Program Information Center (PIC) that will provide data visualizations to help counselors digitize their workflows and assist stakeholders to derive key insights into the program’s financial performance and staffing.
My Impact
Improved and created work processes for 3 user groups
Presented designs to clients and developers weekly
Over 10,000 potential users (counselors, team leads, managers, government)
Collaborated daily on a multidisciplinary and cross-functional team
Discovery
Initial Research
We did not have access to user groups to conduct formalized research. We had to depend on our partner contractors to provide us insights into the program and current pain points in order to determine the happy path for our new design.
Our Process:
Conducted multiple requirements gathering sessions to identify the user groups involved in the process
Conducted additional sessions to understand the goals of each user group
Analyzed current process
Continuous iterations of presenting our current understandings to co-contractor to achieve feedback
User Groups
We identified 4 major user groups during our research.
Counselor: conducts counseling sessions, coordinates and supports community events, conduct outreach to engage more participants
Team Lead: Oversees ~10 counselors in their region. Responsible for ensuring counselors complete their activity forms, reach their utilization targets, and provides feedback to counselors.
Manager: Oversees program to track success and make any necessary improvements. Grouped into the following sub-roles: Regional Manager, Finance Manager, Operations Manager, Project Management Operations (PMO) Manager, Quality Manager, and Operations Specialist Manager
Government: Liaison between the MFLC program and the government
Focus Area
After discussion with our co-contractors and analyzing the overarching process, the team decided to focus our efforts on the happy path for a counselor conducting a non-medical counseling session.
Counselor Deep Dive
Counselors must complete an activity form for every activity they encounter. This includes non-medical counseling, outreach, community events, school presentations, high risk situations (Duty to Warn), etc.
I analyzed the form counselors currently use to conduct their day-to-day activities and determined the potential paths they can go down based on several conditions. Depending on the situation, the user would have to complete different sections of the form.
Key takeaways of current form:
It was a confusing form, it did not provide straightforward directions based on the different paths they could go down
It forced the counselor to go back and forth throughout the form
Compiled all paths into one form, which forced the counselor to complete the full form - even if the path they were on only needed to complete 10% of questions
Clearly this form was a key part of their days, we wanted to simplify it so they can spend less time on paperwork, reduce their workload and make their days more efficient.
Initial Design Decision
Break up the form into different flows: Non-Medical Counseling and Community Involvement.
Community involvement required a significantly less amount of questions to complete. We wanted to separate that part out so they didn't need to keep going through the full form just to answer a few questions.
Product development
Non-Medical Counseling Form
We focused our initial efforts on improving the beast: the Non-Medical Counseling form.
Enhancements made:
Improved information architecture of questions to create a better user flow
Removed duplicative questions
Added conditional logic - if a situation applied to the counselor, then they would continue on that path. If it didn't, they didn't need the extra steps.
Information card - pre-populated with the associated information so they didn't need to continuously add it in
Counselor Dashboard
When focusing on the counselor dashboard, we had to keep the following priorities in mind:
Required to complete their reports by EOD
Responsible for managing their calendars and schedules
Responsible for ensuring they are reaching their utilization target
4 hours/day on counseling
4 hours/day on community involvement
Considerations:
Needed to be tablet friendly
A report had to be completed for every event scheduled
Needed to have the capability to add a report independent of an event (i.e. spur of the moment counseling session)
We didn't want to have duplicative information - creating a calendar AND a to-do list, if it would show the same information
Utilization needed to be shown in a visual format for every day of the week (counselors do not work typical 5 day work weeks)
Any data visualization needed to be 508 compliant
Added hover over for each bar to visually explain what the colors meant (cannot rely solely on color)
Team Lead Dashboard
When focusing on the Team Lead dashboard, we had to keep the following priorities in mind:
Required to complete their reports by EOD
Must review risk reports in a specified timeline, dependent on the risk
Responsible for all counselors in their team and ensuring they are following their requirements
Considerations:
Provided a separation between reports they need to review and reports they must complete
Needed to support a large counselor team and the required information for each counselor
Needed to support counseling activities becauseTeam Leads could act as counselors, if needed
Any data visualization needed to be 508 compliant
Added hover over for each bar to visually explain what the colors meant (cannot rely solely on color)
Lessons learned
Key Takeaways
It’s important to keep a balance between understanding the requirements and getting too deep in the weeds. I found myself getting hung up on requirement details instead of seeing the big picture.
Establish a design system, including a grid, early on to prevent rework.
An obvious one, but it’s important nonetheless - communicate with your PM’s and Engineers! We made sure there was a constant line of communication and feedback between all groups.