Summer 2021 Internship
SimplePractice
Learning from professionals to understand employee pain points and inform internal tool enhancements.
SimplePractice is a clean & accessible EHR platform that manages business so clinician users can focus on the work that matters to them.
Managing a practice as a private clinician is hard. Clinicians are focused on providing quality care to therapy seekers in need, not on business administration or insurance billing. As a private practice owner, managing all parts of the business without experience can be really hard and overwhelming. SimplePractice has set out to make a platform that takes care of the hardest parts of business management so clinicians can focus on what matters.
In order to make an effective platform for clinicians, functionality is only step one. It was paramount to create a welcoming and accessible environment that didn’t cause fear. This means focusing on visual design, content strategy, guided user flows, and consistency.
How could we enhance the SimplePractice platform to further improve the experience of practice management?
I was the only dedicated product design intern within the company and was assigned to the design system team, directly under my internship manager and his PM counterpart.
During this internship, I worked primarily with the design system team to learn the ins-and-outs of proper design system architecture & component management, and also had the opportunity to partner with a PM intern to perform explorative research.
My Role
Workshopping, User Interviews + Research, Competitive Analysis
System-wide Auditing & Pattern Finding
Documentation & Guide Writing
Learned under Design System Team (Designers and PM) and was given the freedom to own my enhancement projects
Partnered with a PM intern to explore how to expand product usage to new demographics
What I Did
Project 1: Design System Enhancements
SimplePractice’s design system (June 2021), while organized well into separate files and pages based on type of information (base, components, icons, etc), had a lack of documentation, redlining, and overall polish. I was tasked with cleaning up the design system in its entirety. At the time, the design system, at it’s best, was a sticker sheet that had components grouped together, but with no way to know how/when to use variations of components, such as buttons or headers.
After an initial audit of the entire design system, I found 3 main factors that when improved altogether would enhance the design system greatly: navigation, documentation, and context.
Navigation: After syncing up with other designers on the team and reflecting on my own onboarding experience with the design system, I realized that the design system was difficult and unintuitive to navigate. Although components were organized well, navigating from page to page and finding specific components was difficult. To combat this, I did 3 things:
I built a table of contents landing page where designers were able to see an overview of the exact contents of each page. This table of contents contained the page title, description, and clickable link for easy navigation. I added two ways to view this table of contents: 1 on the design system file in Figma, and one in our design team’s Notion page.
I formatted each page the same way to add some logical reasoning as to how to navigate each page. Before, each page was organized individually and uniquely, so I reorganized files to be viewed horizontally. This way, each page reads like a book.
One huge complaint I heard from designers across the board was a lack of search-ability and visibility for components, specifically icons. So, I went about researching a new naming convention with alternate name tags so that Figma’s built-in component search function would work more optimally for designers.
Documentation: In general there was a lack of documentation and commenting in the design system, making it difficult to know what exactly a designer is looking at. To fix this, I added a guidelines caption to every frame that summarizes the exact contents.
Contextualization: To add to documentation, I also added screenshots and examples pulled from SimplePractice products to show how the components should be used when designing and how they appear in reality when launched.
Project 2: CTA Button Logic System
Another issue identified in the design system was that there was no rhyme or reason when placing Call to Action (CTA) buttons in the header of pages.
Throughout the product, CTA buttons are present in the header to help identify the most important actions, but the lack of systematic logic and cohesiveness led to confusion. I was tasked with creating a logic system for any header CTA button grouping.
To begin, I performed a full platform audit to identify all pages with header CTA buttons and grouped them into 5 groups: 1 CTA, 2 CTAs, 3 CTAs, 3+ CTAs, and full screen modal toolbar CTAs. By identifying each page with header CTA buttons and grouping them based on the number of buttons, I was able to identify some patterns and build out a basic logic system.
Alongside this final iteration of the site design, I also design the wireframes of the mobile site to be responsive as well. It adopts the same paint stroke background and footer from the desktop site, but the content and layout is adjusted to better suit touch screen devices (swipe functionality). This mobile design relies more heavily on pop up banners to showcase more information so that the landing screens stay clean, concise, and easy to navigate.
Here’s the final deliverable I presented to the design system team and now lives within our design system:
Project 3: Navigation Workflow Enhancement Research
In the spirit of taking ownership of my internship experience, I asked my manager for a project that involved a lot more research and customer interaction. A few weeks later, I was added to a group of designers who were focusing on enhancing the navigation workflow of the web product, focusing on improving client searchability and visibility. After an initial screening through the facebook community group and the open feedback form from UserVoice, we identified 2 areas of improvement: the home screen Search bar and the Recently Viewed tab on the left hand toolbar.
After a deliberation meeting with the rest of the navigation team, I was tasked with creating a 2-part research test plan to identify tangible enhancement solutions SimplePractice could implement to improve client search-ability. In the test plan, I identify our guiding questions and goals, and spell out explicitly what methods are being used.
For the first part of the research test plan, I created a survey using Maze to gather information about the search bar. Since we already had some background information on the Search bar, we were looking for quantifiable information to validate our decision making. In particular, we were looking to understand the customers’ level of satisfaction with the Search bar’s functionality, frequency of use, and if there were any other search types or domains that they would like to be searchable. While we did get this information in spades, we also received surprising pain points about the client search workflow that we immediately sent to engineering for review.
For the second part of the research test plan, I conducted user interviews with customers to gain deeper qualitative and quantitative understanding on the general client search workflow and how useful a tool the Recently Viewed tab is. Because our questions were more specific and open-ended, asking about individual workflows and preferences, we went with the interview route to accommodate different work styles.
Unfortunately, my internship ended before the navigation team could fully synthesize our findings, but the research I did conduct validated much of our design thinking.
Project 4: Prescribing Clinician Expansion Exploration
I had the opportunity to work with a PM intern, Sangeeta, on an exploration project to see how SimplePractice could expand our product to meet the needs of prescribing clinicians. After an initial meeting where Sangeeta shared her research findings, we began a series of daily workshop meetings to discuss specific functionalities that could be implemented. I was tasked with creating mockup prototypes to go with her research presentation to show SimplePractice roadmap managers that this project was worth exploring deeper.
We decided on expanding the client page’s functionality by adding a new tab called “Health Summary” where prescribing clinicians could view, add, delete, and edit client medication, allergy, and vitals information. The process of creating these mockups was an interesting exercise because I had to find a balance in adhering to the design system and branding of SimplePractice while innovating and creating a new interface that would benefit prescribing clinicians specifically.
For the roadmap managers and engineers, I created prototype flows for:
Client Health Summary Page
Medication, Allergy, and Vitals Information Page
The workflow for adding information to Medication, Allergies or Vitals
The workflow for editing information for Medication, Allergies or Vitals
The workflow for deleting information from Medication, Allergies or Vitals
Collaborating with Sangeeta was an extremely rewarding experience because I learned so much about working alongside a product manager and writing user stories to share with engineers.