Delivering Varo’s first Cash Advance Product
What is BetterHelp?
BetterHelp is a cutting-edge online platform that revolutionizes access to mental health services. Serving as a virtual gateway to a diverse spectrum of therapeutic experiences, it provides personalized counseling and support to both individuals and couples. Whether you're navigating the challenges of depression, anxiety, or stress, BetterHelp excels in connecting you with licensed and experienced therapists who skillfully guide you towards emotional well-being.
What sets BetterHelp apart is not just its innovation but also the sheer scale of its impact. Boasting the largest network of therapists and an expansive client base in its category, BetterHelp has established itself as a leader in the realm of online mental health services. This impressive reach ensures that individuals seeking support find a wealth of qualified professionals and a robust community, further solidifying BetterHelp as a go-to platform for transformative and accessible mental health care.
My Role
This feature team was compromised of a PM and designer: myself primarily focused on user experience and
What sets BetterHelp apart is not just its innovation but also the sheer scale of its impact. Boasting the largest network of therapists and an expansive client base in its category, BetterHelp has established itself as a leader in the realm of online mental health services. This impressive reach ensures that individuals seeking support find a wealth of qualified professionals and a robust community, further solidifying BetterHelp as a go-to platform for transformative and accessible mental health care.
Overview
GOAL
The primary goal of this project is to enhance therapist satisfaction with our platform by improving the ease of use, particularly in the areas of messaging their clients and managing action due dates. While focusing on these improvements, it is crucial to ensure that client retention remains unaffected.
PROBLEM
Therapists have expressed significant frustration with the current due dates functionality within the platform. Their feedback highlights a few key concerns:
Lack of Context: Therapists are often unsure why they are prompted to message their clients. For example, some therapists have questioned, “Why am I being asked to message my client when they haven’t said anything?”
Unnecessary Prompts: The system prompts therapists to respond even when it may not be clinically necessary. A common sentiment is, “A response is not needed; they just said bye.”
Perception of Micromanagement: Therapists feel that the system is overly controlling, dictating when they should communicate with their clients. One therapist mentioned, “I determine when it is clinically appropriate to message the client; your system is micromanaging.”
HYPOTHESIS
We believe that these frustrations can be alleviated by:
Providing Better Context: Offering therapists clearer explanations and context for why they are being asked to message their clients. This could include insights into client engagement patterns or reminders based on past interactions.
Enhancing Control: Allowing therapists greater flexibility and control over due dates, including the ability to override or adjust prompts according to their professional judgment. This would remove unnecessary barriers and empower therapists to manage client interactions in a way that aligns with their clinical expertise.
By addressing these areas, we anticipate a significant improvement in therapist satisfaction with the platform, leading to better user experiences without compromising client retention.
My Role
Senior Product Designer
Writing
…
Research
CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP
As a squad of Design, Product, and Research, we walked through different steps of how our customers would feel and experience taking out an advance and repayment as the first-time user, repeat user, and an infrequent user. We explored our customer's emotional responses and talked through different touchpoints.
Key Takeaways:
We acknowledged that our customer feels autonomous and in control for this product to be successful.
Progressively disclosing information will be important, so our customers do not feel overwhelmed by the process.
Creating transparency and upfront on what happens when you go delinquent.
Ideation
User Flow
After creating the customer journey map, I had enough information to create a user flow to document the high level of this feature to bring to key stakeholders.
This task flow focused on the primary use case: As a user, I will need money in the near future.
The two flows exhibited tasks of taking an advance out and the repayment of the advance.
Prototype and testing
TESTING OUR HYPOTHESISES
I prepared usability questions for our researcher team.
Feedback
As a designer, not only do I listen to UX testing, I take in important information from subject matter experts and stakeholders, like the leadership team, customer support, legal, and risk.
They were part of every step of the process. Below has examples of key feedback.
Final Designs
MOBILE
DESKTOP
Solution
RESULTS
Since the Varo Advance has launched, the product has been a huge success:
53% of people qualified for Varo Advance, took an advance.
5.5% est. loss rate which estimated at 7.9%
Varo Advance yielded 33% lower calls per Transaction Active compared to NFO
Customers who use VA make more debit card transactions per month than non-VA customers, but we do not know (yet) if VA is the driving force.
