Lyra Health

Lyra Health is a workplace mental health benefit. They partner with human resources and employee services teams to deliver evidence-based mental healthcare that boosts employee well-being.

My Role (2017-2018)

I wore many hats as the sole designer in an early stage startup. When I joined, I inherited an existing UI and business logic that had already been designed and built.

During my time there, I oversaw expanding the two-sided marketplace that connected providers to people seeking care. I also grew the design team, brought user research into the process, co-creative directed a rebrand, and led the creation of Lyra’s first design system along with a library of responsive web components.

Services

UX/UI Design, Service Design, Workshop Facilitation, Design Mentorship

Service Design: Understanding Lyra From a User’s Perspective

Service Design aims to look at the end-to-end experience between a customer and a service provider. It takes into account all communications and touch points. It looks at all the people, processes and systems involved. Having this view offers a lot of insight into the customer’s perspective, because it takes into account their whole experience with the service.

When Lyra launched, it was a scrappy startup so there were many manual processes still. And as a two-sided marketplace, it was important to understand the service from the care seekers perspective and a providers perspective.

insight: Content Strategy needed

The service design perspective helped us to understand how much care seeker “UX” was happening over automated emails. Some of the emails were triggered by a marketing tool, and others had been hard coded by engineers.

Unfortunately, looking at the whole we could see it was a poor user experience. It also looked disjointed because no one was overseeing the content strategy to create a cohesive language, voice, and tone for these communications. Considering that Lyra was helping someone in moment of difficulty and vulnerability, it was important that Lyra’s messaging was well crafted and came across as thoughtful. I worked with marketing and our clinical team to unify and improve our content strategy.

Lyra’s Value Prop: Evidence-Based Care

Lyra’s value as a service was based on a couple of key ideas.

#1: take away all the difficult legwork of finding a therapist who is available. Any one who’s ever needed to find therapy knows the struggle is real. Many quality therapists are booked up for months.

#2: create a quality network of providers who only practice evidence-based methods, in order to guarantee outcomes. This connected care seekers’ goals with the goals of their employers. Both truly wanted to know that using Lyra would help them get better and feel better.

Disconnect: User’s Don’t Trust Lyra’s Recommendations

As people started using the service, we found people dropping off the website and reaching out because they didn’t like the therapists they were matched with.

The key hypothesis: we don’t emphasize the science behind Lyra’s recommendations enough. If care seekers understood the science behind the care, they would be more excited about curated list of providers.

Unfortunately, as it was designed they felt underwhelmed and unconvinced they were seeing the best options for them.

User Research: Understanding Mental Models

I advocated for qualitative user research to better understand our users mental models and dig into our hypothesis about the science of care.

To do this, we talked to people who were in therapy or had sought mental health care. We also cross-checked our findings with clinical specialists.

Inspiring Trust: Lyra Rebrand

Lyra wanted to inspire trust, but the current UX was based on an outdated and limited brand system that was difficult to use. In fact, there was no system in place, the brand colors shown were pulled from the existing UI.

The marketing team was also struggling to create quality artifacts with the existing brand. We hired an agency and creative directed a rebrand to give Lyra a more modern, trustworthy brand.

Inspiring Trust: Redesigning the Care Seeker UX

With a rebrand and user research insights, I led a redesign of care seeker’s experience on our website.

Workshop & Brainstorming

There was a lot of excitement and ideas about how to make Lyra even better! I facilitated a company-wide workshop to collect all of Lyra’s internal wisdom.

Redesign Constraints

Given limited resourcing, we prioritized ideas that were focused on front-end changes to Lyra’s website vs. ones that impacted the underlying business logic. Given where we were starting, we felt confident there was a lot that could be done with front-end UX alone.

The Redesign

To make an impact, I focused on redesigning the moments of decision-making. The first moment: when care seekers choose a care path. The second: when they choose a provider for that care path. I also looked for ways to increase Lyra’s brand presence and communicate Lyra’s value proposition as a service:

• Added “this is a fit for you” when choosing a care path to help care seekers make informed choices based on science AND their needs

• Created a visual language for Lyra’s care recommendations while still giving them choice at each stage

• Added a modal moment to help them understand what Lyra does for them in curating a provider network

• Created a visual language to emphasize the concept of Lyra recommended therapists with badging

Scaling Design: Building Provider Portal

Lyra was expanding and it made sense to build tools explicitly for the provider network. Lyra needed investment from providers in order to reduce the cost of care in the following ways:

#1: Adopt outcome measures in their practice: Lyra wanted to create a benchmark for care to demonstrate ROI to employers and create an “end date” when therapy was done. This meant asking providers to align on a measure and to regularly use this measure during the therapeutic process.

#2: Integrate their schedules: Lyra wanted providers to integrate their schedules so that clients could book directly through Lyra instead of reaching out separately to the provider.

Our design team needed to grow to support the business in this way. I created a system for us to understand and communicate design capacity, including a t-shirt sizing system. I hired another full-time UX designer to focus on designing tools and workflows for the provider network.

Scaling Design: Building a Responsive Design System

A recurring problem we had was slow incorporation of UX improvements into the end product. Our engineering team had lower capacity for this because they weren’t originally hired for having strong front-end skills.

I worked with the VP of Engineering to get budget and hired a UX-focused engineer contractor who worked closely with the UX team. With this contractor we built a library of responsive web components that could be used across the provider and care seeker experiences. This increased the quality and speed with which we were able to deliver work.