Minddistrict (http://www.minddistrict.com) is a Dutch ehealth company that has been founded in 2008. What Minddistrict provides is a secure, flexible and user- friendly ehealth platform with an extensive catalogue of online modules, diaries and questionnaires to help clients with mental issues on their way to positive change. Minddistrict hopes to use ehealth technology to create more benefits for both clients and therapists, so that mental healthcare could be more efficient and flexible. To achieve this goal, it depends on the users to play an active role in daily use. Therapists engagement is also very crucial to successful implementation.
However, the real situation is that there is not an organization who uses the product in its full potential. Professionals have very little time to learn, or to even think about ehealth. So, the challenge in this project is to find the barriers that stop therapists from using the platform, and to increase the usage of the product.
Through the literature review and user research, multiple factors that may lead to low engagement from five main domains were found out. By collaborating with employees in MD, three design directions were selected based on their viability and feasibility. Also, the design vision was formulated as follows: We want to improve the therapist’s engagement of using the Minddistrict platform, by providing a better onboarding experience and creating an online community where they can actively interact with each other.
The design vision and the nine design requirements gave a clear guide to three design directions: improving the onboarding experience for therapists (Chapter 4), creating an online community (Chapter 5), and exploring future technologies (Chapter 6). For the first two directions, user tests were conducted to collect feedback, and several iterations were done to refine the concepts. For the last direction, two promising technologies were discussed about how to apply them to engage more therapists in ehealth.
The project finishes with recommendations for future improvement and limitations of this project.