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Tactopus
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Designing Access: Creating Research-Based Pathways to Therapy for Children
Constraints
Backend Problems
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Tactopus was built on a constricted webform that would make implementing a lot of design solutions impossible.
Schedules
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The work required a lot of user research, and it was a bit difficult to coordinate across teams and functions to collaborate.
Business Goals
Increase Retention Rates
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We wanted to increase retention rates, ie., convince parents to stick with Tactopus as their online therapy provider.
Ensure Frictionless Engagement​
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Both employees and customers found the platform difficult to use, with edge cases being almost entirely unaccounted for.
Small Design Team​
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The design team consisted of the design lead and myself, and later another intern. The small team meant we had to take on more responsibilities.
User Goals
Discover via research​
While I worked on different aspects of the portal, the overarching theme was this:
Increasing retention rates and decreasing cancellation rates.
Problem Statements
(In a rush? Click one of these to go to that section!)
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Project #1
Optimizing the Sign up/ Login flow to make it easier for everybody involved via Multi Factor Authentication.
The earlier version of the Tactopus registration flow was immensely complicated. It was a bit like this.
Which led parents to feel like this:
Why is multi authentication required?
Therapy is a sensitive issue in India.
Money is involved in the process.
It is a joint venture by both parents.
Where our issues arise
Implementing Multi Authentication:
When designing multi-factor authentication, we wanted to keep it simple while addressing potential challenges. Typically, this involves linking a phone number to an email ID or vice versa. However, we had to consider scenarios like a mother booking a session for her child using an account registered with the father’s email. In such cases, sending a one-time password (OTP) introduces complexities—whose phone number should receive it?
While it’s technically possible to link multiple credentials to one account, backend limitations and a tight deadline meant we had to restrict OTP delivery to a single phone number.
We developed a user flow that accounted for various edge cases. Users register on the Tactopus portal by setting up a primary account with a phone number, email, and password. From there, they can add multiple secondary accounts for other family members or guardians. For therapy to be successful, it actually has to happen.
Some wireframes and some feedback that was given.
Actually even more feedback.
I had weekly syncs with my mentor where I would update her with progress and show her the incorporated feedback. After this, I went on to make the high fidelity screens.
The screens are grouped together by flow in the authentication process.
[It's also blurred because I cannot show them]
Results >
Increase in sessions booked
Support staff reported less queries and calls related to this matter
Project #2
Analysing the Dashboards
There are 4 key personas to Tactopus' portals. We have:
The parents (main user)
Sales
Admin (Support)
Expert (the therapist)
All 4 users have a different dashboard and had various inconsistencies and problems. I was given reign to work on the parent dashboard and the expert dashboard. This required a lot of collaboration with the sales team and the admin support to understand how exactly differently tasks are carried out and by whom.
I'm granted access to the user dashboard and conduct a heuristic evaluation, and focus on improvement opportunities based on the complaints the support staff has passed along.
Parent Dashboard Analysis
How do parent tasks and improvement oppurtunities relate in terms of occurrence?
Let's delve into a few insights.
Insight #1
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Using balance to book sessions
What exactly is balance?
Sessions are purchased in packs.
For example- a parent spends $20 dollars and gets 20 points. Now, the balance is added to their wallet.
The confusion- parents did not understand the concept of balance and how to use it to book a session.
Why do we need to keep it?
Tactopus' main aim is to remain flexible. Balance helps us do that. When a parent registers, they buy a pack of 'points'. One session costs one point and the point is returned if the parent cancels the session before 4 hours. We brainstormed and settled on introducing splash screens to the design.
Now this brought up the question - what do we include in the splash screens? We couldn't risk overburdening the user so we had to decide what information was the most important.
We translated these findings into screen designs to be implemented.
Splash Screens (Medium Fidelity)
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Insight #2 [Expert Dashboard]
Create Goalsheet to keep track
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I was surprised by the complaints by the therapists about their own dashboard. I conducted heuristic evaluations and mapped out all possible the user journeys that the therapists could take.
They had massive problems with scheduling sessions, cancelling them, managing a student's goal sheets, booking consultations and keeping track of the students.
Low Fidelity Wireframes
All of these insights culminated into a solution of creating a goalsheet for the therapists to use to help keep track of progress with the children.
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Design by Azam Anwar
Results >
Support Staff reported less inquiries related to Balance.
Therapists reported finding the goalsheets helpful.
Project #3
"This feels insufficient."
- Parent
Tactopus had a low retention rate. After the parents finished using their sessions, they would not buy now. The reason cited was mainly that their child was not making enough progress.
What was interesting was that a lot of balance went unused.
Balance
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Parent waving au revoir to unused sessions
It seemed that the low retention rate went hand in hand with the high cancellation rate.
I conducted extensive user research here. I was granted access to Interakt - a software that helps you categorize a business' Whatsapp chats and categorized the reasons for cancelling.
Conversation Mining
After extensive conversation mining ( from the support staff to the parents), we confirmed high cancellation rates and sorted cancellation reasons by each persona.
Through our research, we uncovered a recurring issue: Tactopus’ support team often took on too much responsibility for booking sessions, leading to frustration among parents. This hands-on approach caused missed sessions due to unread notifications or scheduling conflicts, such as instances where families were traveling. This created a poor user experience for parents.
Design solution:
Keep the support team's help to a minimum. As a company, we can only advise our customers, not do it for them. Thus, the parents were in charge of booking their child's sessions. To maintain consistency, the experts could send a session request. However, it was ultimately up to the parents to accept it.
Experts cancelled sessions on a less frequent basis but when they did, it could be difficult to communicate that to the parents. We implemented a new feature - Notes. Therapists could send personalized messages to inform parents of cancellations, suggest interim techniques for the child, and propose the next available date. Thus, by keeping communication between the parents and the expert, the conversations became more effective.
Rough template ideas for the expert to choose from
Our conversation mining did not reveal reasons for low conversion rates.
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Hence, we went to the source themselves- the therapists.
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I organized interviews with 8 therapists.
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Transcript of user interviews
Discovery
By having open ended questions, we came across a new perspective. The initial free consultations weren't long enough for the therapists to build a rapport with the child and to understand the parents concerns and build trust. And if the parents could not glean sufficient information from the consultation session, they were reluctant to pay for actual sessions.
Design Solution:
Increase the time duration of each consultation.
Results >
Less sessions were cancelled.
A higher conversion rate was reported.
Positive Impact
This was by far, my most fulfilling internship yet. While I have always known I wanted to do something for children, the work at Tactopus cemented my belief and ambition. My favorite part of working at Tactopus was the immense amount of research the work entailed. It made every step feel important. Interacting with the therapists was a novel experience I will always cherish. More over, everybody at Tactopus was extremely empathetic. When I was designing the leave system for employees, I was told that there was no reason to actually deny an employee a leave, and hence to design accordingly.
The empathy and kindness I was shown as an intern touched me deeply. Every day, I try to be just as compassionate.
Company Impact >
40 % increase in conversions.
36% decrease in cancellations.
Less errors reported due to goalsheets.
Less unused balance reported.
Learnings >
Talk to user sooner than later.
Translate research into actionable insights
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[Tactopus has now been acquired!]