WePractice
Find the right expert
and start improving your mental health today.
By Priscila Ferreira
We Practice is an online directory that helps people to find the right mental health expert easily and fast. We Practice offers a bunch of professionals that can help people improve their mental health problems & also offers a modern physical location for the sessions.
The professionals can also benefit from the directory to acquire new clients and can also have the opportunity to use the physical location as a co-working space.
The Challenge
To help Therapists to practice successfully
Therapists & Psychotherapists have difficulties to start building their careers because of a lack of clients and not having enough budget to build a proper office.
My Journey
Starting from scratch
When I joined, WePractice was a team of 6 people with different expertise: two business development, a growth marketer, a working student, a product owner, and me, a UX/UI Designer.
My position was REMOTE, due to the pandemic but also because the other members of the team were based in Zurich. We always had a lot
of online meetings. Communication was never an issue :-)
The UX Process
User Research - Qualitative interview
Co-Creation- Design Thinking
Prototype Testing
Design
Development - Pixel perfect
Hand-off - Development
User Research
The assumptions to be validated
Before everything start, there was already a business idea that was basically building a co-working space for therapists. However, a lot of uncertainties came up. In order to build a user-centric solution, a proposed a user interview to validate the two main assumptions:
Delegated therapists from Switzerland find it difficult to build their own practice due to the high cost of renting and contract commitment.
Therapists in Switzerland have difficulties building their network because they don’t know where to find other professionals with similar roles.
User Profile (target group criteria)
We decided to use the following user profile:
Delegated Therapists & Psychotherapists
With more than 10 years of experience
Based in Switzerland
User Interview goal
Besides the assumptions that we wanted to validate, the goals that we defined for the user interview were:
Understand how Delegated Therapists work.
Understand what blockers prevent therapists to become independent in their careers.
Understand which features would be important for them.
To acquire the users, I used the support from Testing Time. The interviews took place online, 40 min each and it was facilitated by me with the support of our working student taking notes and recording the sessions.
Interview Insights -
8 therapists
The main insights:
Building an office practice is expensive - All the interviewees mentioned the high cost of renting a place for building their office practice. Besides also the bureaucracy with landlords, the fixed cost of bills, cleaning, and equipment is a concern.
Delegated therapist is complicated - In delegated therapy, patients are referred by a psychotherapist to a designated non-medical psychotherapist for the evaluation and treatment of mental disorders. The therapist is employed by the psychotherapist. Health insurance companies thereby consider the work of delegated psychotherapists as a standard benefit. In contrast, psychiatrists can as doctors have their invoices settled directly by health insurance companies.
Networking is hard - Since they are employed by a psychiatrist, they don’t have much chance to either find clients by themselves or get to know other professionals in a similar situation.
Become independent therapists - 70% of the interviewees mentioned the wish to become independent at some point. The main reason why they are not enough secure with this decision is that they don’t know how to find new clients and also don’t know how to run a business by themselves.
Co- creation: Design Thinking Workshop
How might we help independent Therapists to practice successfully?
Starting with this beautiful “how might we” question, our workshop began. The participants with different roles created diverse insights and productive collaborative workshop:
Starting with this beautiful “how might we” question, our workshop began. The participants with different roles created diverse insights and productive collaborative workshop:
Empathise: After getting real and valuable insights from therapists, I could build the first persona. I presented to the team and it was the first step in a co-creation of a product our users would love.
2. Define: The problems we focused on:
Therapists normally start their careers as delegated therapists. After some time, they might get frustrated because they want to become independent, however, they find difficult the transition.
Therapists want to build their own careers but they are afraid of investing too much money to build their own practice and commit their income with high fixed costs.
When therapists become independent, they don’t know where to start acquiring new clients, and it can increase the risk of failure.
3. Ideate: After a fun session, we came up with lots of ideas. But what was considered a potential solution?
Website with therapist profile available for booking
Booking system easy and quick
Co-working space for the member of the website
Feedback: I invited the same therapists that participated in the first round of the interview to show the prototype and get feedback on that:
A website with a therapist profile available for booking - Seems to be very interesting for them. They all got excited to have their available profiles/CV in a more beautiful way.
Booking system easy and quick - 70% of them found it interesting but the other 30% showed concern about synchronization with their agenda. How would that work if they plan a vacation?
Co-working space for the member of the website - Not that interesting because they don’t need a space to work. They would be very interested if therapy rooms are offered to rent at an affordable price.
4 Prototype & test: The prototype I created was a simple landing page designed and implemented in WordPress. The goal of this prototype was “faking” an existing solution, to show the benefits and get quick feedback from users.
Designing the product
User journey
Now that the first step of the research and ideation part was done, it was time to start designing the product. I started with a basic user journey, now thinking about the end-user (the patients) that would interact with the platform.
First wireframes
Due to a tight timeline, I choose low-fidelity wireframes to help facilitate the project team communication and align with content prioritisation to deliver the basic experience. I used the Balsamiq tool to crate that.
Introducing WePractice
WePractice is the modern mental health platform with the goal of making the best possible psychological support accessible to all.
We allow therapists to fully focus on their clients and provide them with the best possible psychological support.
We Practice is a responsive solution and can be accessed on desktop, tablet, or mobile.
Find the right therapist
Use the different filters to narrow down your search and learn more about the therapists on their personal profiles.
Book a session
Book an online therapy session with the therapist of your choice. Not sure yet? Then arrange a free intro call to get to know the therapists and clarify any questions you may have.
We help independent therapists to practice successfully
WePractice supports its members in various areas so that they can independently and successfully carry out their practice activities.
✔ Access to modern practice space on an hourly or daily basis.
✔ Referral of new patient:s & clients via the WePractice directory & GP practice referrals
✔ Access to a strong community of psychology and psychotherapy professionals
✔ Support in all areas on the path to independence
✔ Opportunity for regular participation in intervision and supervision forums
✔ Free participation in continuing education courses (FSP certified)
How a got there
The platform was fully designed in Figma and hand-off to the engineering team for implementation.
The development of the whole platform took about 3 months to be completed and successfully released.
WePractice is a successful product
WePractice is a modern community of practice for independent psychotherapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychological counselors. Now, there are over 100 therapists’ profiles on the platform, and, has been growing its locations too. It started in Zurich, but now you can find it in 8 other cities around Switzerland. WePractice has helped thousands of people to find the right therapist to start improving their mental health.