SONAR
Designing a dashboard to improve response time by 40%.
TIMELINE
January - March 2024
ROLE
UX Lead
TOOLS
Figma, FigJam
Introduction
Students need mental health support.
Undergoing life changes and challenges, students may not even know they are struggling or how to ask for help. Sonar provides mental health support to students through a text-messaging platform that is powered by AI and peer health counselors.
In this project, I designed a dashboard to help Sonar’s counselors lower response time to messages from users and measure progress in student wellbeing.
My Role
I was the UX Lead for this project and my responsibilities included: wireframing, prototyping, user research, usability testing, and brand application.
I collaborated with a User Research Lead, Technology Lead, and Business Lead throughout this project.
Problem
We spoke with 2 of Sonar’s counselors over Zoom and learned more about their workflow.
“I’m spending more time playing catch up than I am actually providing mental health support to the kids.”
- Sonar Counselor
Here’s how they work…
Why it’s important.
With so many different people working with one student, it’s increasingly difficult to create a personalized experience that provides effective support. Instead of creating an action plan based on their student’s progress, counselors are just trying to figure out what’s going on every time they open a student’s message.
Defining the problem.
“How can we help Sonar’s peer health counselors send messages to students more efficiently?”
Ideation
Knowing that we wanted to incorporate project management features into our dashboard, I conducted research on best practices and what people love about existing tools.
User Feedback
Over Zoom, we introduced the first iteration to 2 of Sonar’s Counselors and our team advisor to get their initial thoughts and opinions.
The main goal of this feedback session was to learn how they like to work and what tools they will need to help them succeed.
Here’s what we got from these sessions…
Cluttered.
Where do we want our eyes to be drawn towards first?
Heavy Conversations!
How can we inspire counselors to continue supporting youths?
Team VS Personal Tasks.
How will counselors navigate between their individual tasks while staying in the loop with the team?
Iteration
Taking the feedback into consideration, I brainstormed on how we could better organize the dashboard the conversations page to suit their needs better. One of the iterations I liked best replaced the calendar view with a kanban board to organize tasks.
Further Improvements
For the final deliverable, there were a couple of things on my to-do list to improve the user flow and visual design of the dashboard to better support counselors...
Align UI elements with Sonar’s futuristic branding.
Add student list within conversations for easy navigation.
Design Patient Profiles tab for seamless documentation.
Provide more views and a filter feature for task management.
Project Showcase
Dashboard
Primary location for counselors to manage administrative and internal work.
Impact Metrics
Helps counselors quantify their personal impact and individual contributions to improve practices.
Analytic Tools
Visualize trends and data among their students to determine action items and next steps to provide better support.
Task Manager
Organize, visualize, and collaborate on tasks. Filter and search to easily find what you need to know.
Task Detail Pop-out
Key details and specific information for tasks nested within a ticket.
Tagging
Assign tasks, timelines, and key tags for filtering and status checks.
Checklist
Break down complex tasks into sub-tasks and check them off as you go.
Attachments/Notes
Store important documents and leave notes to keep your team in the loop.
Task Views
Visualize your tasks based on your current needs.
List View
Focus on one or more groups of tasks based on status. Useful for an overview of outstanding items.
Timeline View
Visualize the timeline of each task and how they overlap. Helpful for moving tasks along and determining available bandwidth.
Patient Profiles
All patient records and information stored in one place.
Patient List
Search and filter through all patients to easily find information.
Working Document
Update and view patient info and preferences as they progress.
Attachments/Notes
Store important documents and leave notes to keep your team in the loop.
Conversations
Integrated messaging system. No more clicking through so many windows.
Patient List
Search and filter through patients to easily find who you’re chatting with.
AI Prompts
Select a message and see what AI- generated response works best.
Auto-Fill
Click and auto-fill response box with AI-generated response. Edit as you see fit before you send.
Getting Context
Condensed patient profile in side panel for easy access to information.
Collaboration
Leave notes in the side panel to document important changes or new details that counselors should know.
Documentation
Indicate key information that can be referenced when updating patient profiles in the future.
What impact did this have?
Comparing the time it took for counselors to initially respond to students and the time it took using the dashboard, we were able to help counselors respond more efficiently.
Constraints
No reference of Sonar’s existing UI System.
We were building from scratch. To overcome this I…
Referenced widely used and effective task management systems.
Conducted more usability testing to really understand and empathize with WC workflows.
Only 2 counselors to interview and learn from.
Small sample for getting feedback. To overcome this I…
Asked more questions about workflow and process to pinpoint areas we could help improve.
Met frequently to get more feedback throughout the design process.
Future Considerations
Iterative testing and consistent user feedback throughout the design process is incredibly important to understand user’s needs and motivations. What we initially thought would be helpful ended up changing as we received feedback.
For future iterations, testing the user flow with counselors would help improve the design placements and eliminate any redundancy. Conducting more research on how to best motivate counselors through the weekly metrics will also be helpful towards creating a positive work environment.
In conclusion,
Our team is proud to have presented designs to Sonar that they want to implement into their internal system. It was a great learning experience having to jump into a new space and gain a quick understanding of how the AI LLMs and overall company worked.
Beyond designing,
I was able to step up and manage our project timeline, lead meetings, and present rationale behind my design decisions.
Thank you!
A huge thank you to the team at Sonar, our advisor, and my teammates!
Please feel free to contact me at crystalpham29@gmail.com for further questions.