App for Coaches — UX case study

A study project for UX course on how to make coach’s planning work easier

Photo by William Iven on Unsplash

Challenge

Mental health counselors and coaches in Russia work mostly as freelances, so they need to do all the planning work by themselves — decide where to find clients, how to attract them, plan the sessions schedule and remember all their clients stories. It could get very overwhelming and coaches tend to keep their notes in lots of places, feeling insecure about their work stability and find it hard to plan several month ahead.

Goal

My idea was to create an App that will help counselors and coaches in:

1. Work schedule planning
2. Work load analysis
3. Getting insights about clients and topics in demand

UX process

First of all I wanted to find out if my idea would have any value and solve the problems for coaches in real life. I needed to empathize with them and discover the main problems to tackle with my App. Here is the process that I was following:

The design process I was following

User Research

The first step is always to know the User — how they are doing all this planning and analysis now? How are they feeling about this experience and what pain points are they trying to solve?

I prepared a list of questions for User Interview to understand the context of counselor’s job and focusing on user’s past and current experience of scheduling clients and planning their workload. My goal was to ask for user’s specific examples and feelings, trying to get most possible real picture instead of the idealized and socially acceptable answers.

The examples of User Interview questions I used

First general insights:

• Counselors and coaches love their work with clients, but are frustrated when it comes to all the planning and organizing appointments
• They use lots of tools for planning, often several at ones — Calendars in smartphones, notes in smartphones, notebooks, sticker notes, calendar on the wall
• Most of booking happen through phone calls or emails
• Most of them have a vague idea of how clients find them and try to advertise on lots of platforms at ones
• They usually plan only for the next week-month, so feel unsure about the long term plans and income

Pain points

1. The planning process seems to be a pain point and there are many ways they currently use to solve it (like calendars, notepads, notes in smartphones, stickers, excel sheets etc.) but it still creates some confusion and frustration.
2. As a consequence from the first pain point — it is difficult to analyze the scope of practice looking back and many just don’t do it. They trust their gut feeling if they have enough clients or not, but that may lead to less confidence.

Market research

Inspired that the need for this kind of App seemed to real, I have looked at the client planning Apps that were already available at the time.

After classifying all the features that coaches already use or would like to have, I’ve defined 11 key metrics for this analysis and looked if Apps had the following options:

• Calendar — choosing dates and times
• Seeing if the time is free/booked
• Visual analysis of the booked time for previous weeks/months
• Marking different types of appointments with different colours
• Calculating income and expenses
• Client card information
• Adding files / photos of supporting materials
• Adding comments to client card
• Adding client satisfaction rate
• Grouping clients
• Push notifications

Market research of 9 Apps

User Personas

So I needed to pull together all the information I heard in my interviews and create User Personas. I wanted them to reflect the major goals and frustrations of my possible users and describe their current work process. The result was 2 User Personas and I called them Successful Paul and Beginner Anna.

Here is the “Successful Paul” User Persona

Storyboarding

So having my 2 Personas in front of my eyes it was time to imaging how exactly they would interact with my App. Oh, I had lot’s of ideal scenarios in my head and at first wanted my App to have almost every feature I could imagine. What I realized soon enough — you don’t need to put all possible functions in it (that’s impossible or too expensive or takes too much time and the main thing — users will probably use only 20% of it in the end).

To help structuring my thought process and create a visual representation I draw a storyboard (I loved to draw comics as a child and my drawing skills kind of stayed on that level — sorry for that!— but it helps to get the idea):

Storyboard 1 when Paul receives a message from a client and schedule her in the App

Storyboard 2 where Paul schedule the next session and add some comments and a photo of learning materials

Information Architecture

I started to plan what screens would be in my App and what questions could my users possibly have on each of these screens.

Some high level structure and user questions made in Realtime Board.

It helped me plan in details what features I will include on each screen and have a user flow could look like.

Wireframes

It was a time to draw some wireframes and test them!

First wireframes: screen “Schedule client”, screen “Calendar”, screen “Client card with their name and session format”, screen “Calendar with client scheduled and option to set a reminder”

First wireframes were very simple and I thought quite easy to use. Turn out it wasn’t the case at all!

1st screen: during testing users felt intimidated that are offered to schedule client straight away without understanding what this App is about

2d screen: offered a calendar where user needed to click on a time slot and the pop-up will appear with 2 options “New client” and “Existing client” (if there is a client list already). Some users felt confused that they should start with choosing the time and not with fill in the client info first.

3d screen: client card where user could put a name of the client and choose from a drop-down list the type of session (online or in person). The issue here was that users wanted to enter more information to the card but at the same time when I tested the option with lots of information — they said that by the end of filling it in the have forgotten what did they choose at the first place and got anxious about it.

4th screen: showed the calendar with the chosen time slot marked in color and an offer to set a reminder about this meeting (an hour before or a day before). Overall users felt ok with it, but all of them were wondering what is next? How to look for the info? How to edit it if needed?

The overall feedback was — “It doesn’t seem so different from what I’m doing now with the Calendar in my phone, so what’s the value?” Well, that was a great learning for me — and the main one was to make wireframes that would reflect my ideas and show the value clearly, not just rely on a users to imagine all other functions that supposed to be there.

So here is the wireframes of 3 screens that reflected all the feedback I’ve received:

Final wireframes: screen 1 offers 4 menu options “New client”, “My clients”, “My calendar” and “Statistics” with a sign in and registration buttons on the bottom; screen 2 shows Calendar that reflects time slots taken, that client name already scheduled for this day and a button “Schedule client”, as well as buttons “Menu” and “My clients” at the bottom; screen 3 shows the Client card with much more information “Name”, “Contact”,”Topic”, “Price”,”Place”, “Format”,”How find out about me”,”Add photo” and drop down menu to choose the date and time for the session and an option to reserve this time for __ weeks ahead.

As you can see the final wireframes were much more detailed and showed all I wanted to test and the tests went well with them. It was a time to make a prototype!

Prototyping

I created a prototype with 22 main screens for the future testing.

Here are some of the screens from the prototype in Russian (as all the tests were conducted in Russian):

Prototype screens made in Axure

And here are the same screens translated to English just to know what is going on here:

Prototype screens made in Whimsical

And here you can try the interactive prototype with all 22 screens in Axure that was used to conduct the user testing: https://ivz89y.axshare.com

User testing

To see how the users will interact with the prototype and find out about the issues and challenges they experience while using the App I have created 5 scenarios for the testing.

Scenario 1

Task: Schedule a new client

Legend: You want to try new App and schedule a client Olga Orlova for 5th October 12 pm this week. She wants to talk about relationships with her daughter. You would also like to receive a reminder an hour before.

Scenario 2

Task: Look up statistics for sessions formats

Legend: You’ve been already scheduling clients in the App for several months and want to understand which format — Skype or in person — is more popular with your clients.

Scenario 3

Task: Look up information about a client

Legend: You former client Elena N. wants to schedule a new session after a long break and you don’t remember clearly what were the topics of your work and how long did you work with her. Please find the information about her.

Scenario 4

Task: Look up statistics for popular topics

Legend: You’d like to give a new advertising for your practice and you want to understand what topics are the most common among your clients so you can mention it in an add.

Scenario 5

Task: Schedule an existing client

Legend: Your existing client Igor P. has just send you a message asking to schedule to schedule his next session on October 6th 11 am.

Questions after the tests

1. How easy do you find the process on a scale 1–5? Why?
2. How would you rate your satisfaction on the scale 1–5? Why?
3. What features did you find helpful?
4. What other features or information would be helpful?
5. What did you like?
6. What would you change?

Metrics for the tests

• Completed / not completed the task
• Satisfaction with the experience
• Time it took to complete the task

User testing results

I have tested the prototype with 4 users and put the metrics results in the table for each Task:

Findings

• Scheduling existing client turned out to be confusing for some users as there were 2 ways to do it — going through “Calendar” or through “My clients” and most chose the way through the Calendar which was more familiar but took more time.
• Some users wanted to be able to filter statistics according to time periods (weeks/months/years) for better analysis
• Some users felt the information they needed to fill in was to much
• Some users wanted to add information about the scheduled sessions time to the client card
• Some users wanted times slots to be highlighted in different colours according to types of session / format of session to be able to instantly get the whole picture

Key Learnings

1. During the first stage of user research I was relying only on the interviews and not doing an observation method to see how they really do it. I discovered much later in the process that users often don’t remember clearly how they do things and miss out many details — so I would definitely include it.
2. During Market Research I was seeing only other Apps as competitors, when in fact all the ways they are doing planning now are the competitors as well including notebooks, pads and sticker notes. I would now think about it through Jobs to be done approach.
3. Context always matters! In Russia both mental health counselors and coaches are non licensed professions and they don’t have any legal obligation about client data protection (sad, but true). Since I came to Canada I learnt that here counselors need to keep all their client information confidential in the safe and use only approved online work tools. So obviously my whole idea about client card wouldn’t work here and I would approach it totally different.

Thank you so much for reading my first Medium post!