Delivering mentorship and supervision at scale
A UX project, solving for one of the core touch points of the mental health ecosphere of India
Table of contents
1· Introduction
∘ Who am I?, and why this project?
∘ Timeline, role, and constraints
2· Research
∘ Objectives
∘ Findings
3· The journey of finding a supervisor in India
∘ Summarising the journey map
4· Problem Statement
5· Designing the service
6· Why would supervisors and mentors even join?
7· You have reached the end
Introduction
To understand this case study and the value it wishes to deliver, I want you to be aware of just one fact:
There’s been a 50% increase in the number of students enrolling in psychology courses in our country
Careers in psychology are estimated to grow at an average of 14% on year, and given the rising cases of depression and suicide in our country, I think that this is a beautiful number.
My intention with this project is therefore to cater to this growing market, as with an increasing number of psychiatrists, psychologists, counsellors (yes the three are different!) there will be an increase in their needs significant enough for the B2Bs to capture this market and make enough profits to sustain them, while also doing something meaningful.
Who am I?, and why this project?
I am the 50%, I am someone who quit engineering and made a switch to psychology in hopes of understanding myself and others around me, and to cater to what people needed in order to feel better and thrive in their lives.
I did my bachelors from SD College, Chandigarh, where for the last 2 years of my undergrad, I was elected to represent and lead the department of psychology and the psychology club. This enabled me to have conversations with students and teachers about the state of affairs of psychology and psychotherapy in India, allowing me to understand its various pain points that need to be addressed, one of my core motivating questions being:
How can India stand up if it fails to even get out of the bed?
Timeline, role, and constraints
- This was a 3 month long project where,
- I was responsible for each and every aspect of research and design, that is user interviews, secondary research, competitive analysis, wire-framing, and prototyping.
- While also ensuring that my first UX project didn’t suffer
This project is my conceptual understanding of the needs, pain points and requirements of therapists of India who are just starting out in their careers.
Research
My intentions with UX research were quite straightforward, I first wanted to know the realities of my TG and generate insights about the potential gaps in the market, and then take the help of behavioural analysis competitive analysis to fill these gaps.
Objectives with user interviews
- Have open conversations with therapists and,
- Find out about their day to day activities, their needs, desires, and motivations, and most importantly what they find frustrating about their work/about the field.
- Dive deeper into their needs and frustrations while also connecting these aspects to the larger picture of psychotherapy in India.
Findings
Although I got to know about the various interesting facets of psychotherapy and how it is practiced in the real world, staying consistent with my core objectives, here is what I found,
- Therapists don’t get fair compensation from employers (clinics and startups)
- In order to cater to the complex needs of their patients, therapists require opportunities to consistently up skill themselves. This means, better research, development, and training of therapeutic techniques.
- And finally how much there is a need of certified and experienced supervisors on an individual level, and a B2B level and how frustrating it is for therapists and startups to find and retain supervisors for their practice.
Now all of the above mentioned domains have a series of very interesting problems just waiting to be solved. I have my own insights for points 1 and 2 which are a WIP, but for this case study we will be looking a bit deeper into problem number 3, i.e, supervision
The journey of finding a supervisor in India
To collate all the data points I had gathered thanks to generative research, competitive analysis, and user interviews; I took the help of journey mapping and empathy mapping; this helped me walk in the shoes of a new therapist and was crucial to determine important touch-points while designing the service.
To have a closer look at the map feel free to browse this file.
Summarising the journey map
- Finding mentors and supervisors online is an exhausting process:
- Firstly, its hard to determine whether a supervisor even offers the service in the first place or not.
- Secondly, reaching out these people is equivalent of send cold-emails, which as we know has very poor conversions.
Problem Statement
All this research brings us to the following problem statement
How might we enable aspiring young therapists in India to have better access to mentorship and supervision services so that they can grow in their practice?
Interestingly enough, there were only 1–2 odd competitors in the market for this kind of a service with negligible online presence, and that makes sense cause supervisor aggregation has not been a profitable market to address in the first place, but that is not stopping me from building it, after all this is a passion project, and has potential to achieve the first mover advantage.
Designing the service
What this service intends to be is an online space where therapists and supervisors can come together and help each other out. Here you can:
- Search for mentors and supervisors by the specialisation that they cater to, or by their level of experience.
- Interact with mentors to discuss and explore the nooks and crannies of their niches, and
- Interact with supervisors and get feedback on the execution of your practice with individual clients.
Why would supervisors and mentors even join?
This is an important question to ask, why solve for a problem that has no validity in the first place?
However the chicken and egg dilemma here is without a large number of MAU, mentors and supervisors won’t be interested to come and on the other hand, without good supervisors and mentors, users won’t come to this service.
This dilemma will eventually be solved by the virtue of future design and marketing, but at the present level, the service has been designed to massage the ego and vanity of supervisors by the exhibition of virtue signals like:
- Number of sessions conducted
- Feedback and reviews given by mentees
- Research contributions made by therapists and supervisors over the span of their careers
In the future the app could even integrate AI services which would allow mentors and supervisors to generate content out of the sessions that they conduct, thereby enhancing their content marketing game.
You have reached the end
I wish I could write everything about my process and my learnings, but I have to respect the time and attention of the reader, however if you are interested you can book a discovery call with me and discuss this further anytime.
I don’t want this passion for therapy, for this conversation to end right here and would love to further learn (and/or unlearn) about this space more.
Thank you for your time…
