Google UX Design Certificate Course 2: My First Portfolio Project!
Hey, everyone!
It’s been a hot minute since my last post. I’ve been so busy between my work as a writer and all the time I’ve been spending diving into the Google UX certificate, but I’m back.
Anyway, I’m back this week with my thoughts on the second course in the program, called Empathize, Define, and Ideate. In this part of the course, students learn to empathize with users by putting them first, defining what the users’ problems are, and coming up with ways to solve those problems. After the rather dry first course, the second course was a breath of fresh air since I got to get my hands dirty and start designing!
I won’t bore you with a play-by-play recount of everything that was in this module, since the title makes it pretty self-explanatory. But as a broad overview, the second course covers: conducting user research; building empathy maps; identifying user pain points; creating personas, user stories, and user journey maps; building problem statements; and carrying out a competitive audit. Instead of re-hashing all that, I thought I’d dive deeper into my first portfolio project, why I chose it, and what I experienced while doing my research.
Course two tasks students with selecting a prompt for their first portfolio project, which will be a mobile app. A provided tool called Sharpen generates ideas for the student’s app, but I didn’t like any of the prompts, so I went in a different direction.
As someone who is LGBTQIA+ and has ongoing mental health problems, I know first-hand how frustrating and difficult it can be to find a competent and affirming mental health provider. It’s even more difficult to find someone who understands the unique needs of the LGBTQIA+ community.
I’ve lost count of the hours and days I’ve spent going through potential leads only to wind up sitting across from a therapist who either squirms in their seat when I talk about my life and identity. Or worse, one who claims to have knowledge and experience working with the LGBTQIA+ community but prove in our first session that they don’t.
Some apps and services on the market claim to fill this gap, but in my experience using them as a consumer, they’re rarely more than a re-skinned version of an existing app or service with a Pride flag slapped on them. They’re also often prohibitively expensive, which is a major problem for the LGBTQIA+ community as we experience higher rates of job discrimination and financial instability.
So, I chose to design an app that would focus on connecting members of the LGBTQIA+ community with mental health providers who are actually knowledgeable and supportive of their community.
I knew the LGBTQIA+ community experienced unique problems with finding mental health providers. But who was looking for services, and what specific problems had they experienced? To find out, I wanted to speak with a diverse group of users who were between the ages of 20 and 75, who represented a variety of LGBTQIA+ identities, and who came from varied social and economic backgrounds.
Because of the ongoing pandemic, finding research participants was more difficult than it might’ve been otherwise. I ended up speaking with a diverse group of four people from the ages of 23 to 53. I spoke with one participant in person, and the rest were online, either via Zoom calls or via an online messaging platform.
Their answers varied, but one frustration that came up in all four interviews was wasted time.
Each user I spoke to told me they wished there were a way to filter or match with providers based on their specific needs, from questioning their gender or sexuality all the way to writing letters for gender-affirming surgeries. This would save users a lot of time by eliminating the pain of finding and making an appointment with someone who couldn’t (or sometimes refused to) help them.
Users also complained about inaccurate or outdated information in the profiles of mental health providers. Specifically, inaccuracies in their locations and which insurance plans they accept makes it difficult to either contact providers or trust that they offer the services listed.
This got me thinking about who I was designing for and why, so I got to work making some personas!
I hadn’t expected the idea of a screener or matching questionnaire to be so popular. That told me right away that it would have be a critical part of my app, but I wasn’t sure what the best way to implement it would be. So, I took pen to paper in a Crazy Eights exercise:
I liked several of these ideas, so once I finished the exercise, I was eager to put some of them into practice with a real design. Before I could do that, I needed to take stock of the competition to identify other potential gaps and opportunities, so I got busy with my competitive audit.
Side note: the competitive audit was far and away the most time-consuming part of this course so far. That probably won’t continue to be the case, but I thought I’d mention it for anyone who’s not there yet. Definitely budget plenty of time to work on yours, because it’s critically important and you don’t want to rush things.
I identified four competitors, direct and indirect: Pride Counseling; Psychology Today; Talkspace; and BetterHelp. The major gaps and opportunities I found were that competitor’s products often have lengthy, multi-step on-boarding sequences; they often claim to support the LGBTQIA+ community in their marketing but then bury those settings or features within their apps; and all but one of them were incredibly expensive — Talkspace and BetterHelp can cost as much as $396 per month!
By completing that audit and writing up an accompanying report, I also completed the second course of Google’s UX certificate program!
As much as I’ve learned about UX in this course, the user research for my assignments has also taught me a lot about my community and the unique struggles we face in access to health care, whether it’s mental or physical.
It’s also made me appreciate how genuinely lucky I am to have found a therapist who is also a member of the LGBTQIA+ community and educated about it. As my research proved, few people can make that claim, which motivates me more to create this app and bring it to the market someday. It’s desperately needed.
Since this is my first portfolio project, the focus of this blog going forward will probably shift more to sharing my work as I progress with it, along with some general thoughts about the Google certificate program sprinkled throughout.
Overall, I’m very pleased with my experience in the course so far. I’ve learned a ton already, and I’m more excited than ever now to work on wireframes and prototypes of my project. I’ll talk about my work there soon in my next post on course three, since it covers that very thing.
See you there soon!
