Addapp: Creating Therachat
Date
March-
August 2017
Team
Chhavi Arya
Henri Blanke
Henrique Pedarosa
Sajid Reshamwala
Dimitris
Kouris Kalligas
Judith Straetemans
Chris Cousins
Amanda Kennedy
Methods
Interviews
Rapid Prototyping
Workshops
Minimum Viable Product
My Role
User Researcher
The Problem
How do you lead user research sprints to decide on a new product direction in the digital health sphere?
At Addapp, our leadership team decided to pivot from a health data aggregation app. We had 6 months to decide on a new product direction within the digital health space. Our team of 12 went into research and ideation mode. I led the research portion of this project, spearheading ten week-long research sprints that directly illuminated the team’s design sprints each following week and ultimately helped us to land on a new product direction.
Research and Design Sprints
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Our team decided on a handful of topic areas within the larger "world" of health and wellness: women's health, sleep, behavior change, company wellness programs, and aging populations. We dove into one topic per research sprint.
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For each research sprint, I spent 5 days developing a script, recruiting participants, running user interviews, and conducting analysis.
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On the last day of each research sprint, I led an interactive share-out with my team to walk them through emerging insights and led activities that kickstarted the ideation process.
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From there, the team spent five days developing product prototypes, and running usability tests with target users. Meanwhile, I moved onto the next research topic.
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After we ran research and design sprints for each of the topics, the Addapp leadership team shifted focus to the following areas: aging populations, behavior change, and autoimmune conditions. We found these areas to be promising based on research findings. We repeated a similar process of research and design sprints for these topics.
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I also led a round of interviews with Subject Matter Experts in health insurance and primary care to understand experts' perspectives on these topics.
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The Addapp leadership team realized that stress served as a common thread through the topics we had researched thus far. I interviewed people with demanding jobs, high-risk pregnancies, those who have suffered burnout—to understand stress in new ways.
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Addapp decided to focus on two different target user groups within the stress umbrella: mental health professionals and working professionals.
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Addapp had a pitch day, where we each pitched our product ideas based on problems faced by those target groups and voted on our favorites. We ended up pursuing two Minimum Viable Products: Therachat, a chatbot-powered mental health platform for therapists to better support client outcomes, and Lucid, a Slack integration to help managers better detect employee stress levels using Natural Language Processing.
Which MVP Will Gain More Traction?
Lucid
vs.
Therachat
Impact
Based on MVP performance, research outcomes, and business metrics, we decided to launch our new product, Therachat.
Our cross-functional team learned that therapy is so much more than the sessions themselves—it extends into the time in between sessions. People struggle to work toward their therapy goals in between sessions.
Therachat is the support system that encourages clients to work toward their therapy goals in between sessions.
