Simplifying Settings

Company
SimplePractice

Startup - B2B

Health tech

My Role
Design Lead, [UI, UX & Research]

Year
2022 - 23

Project duration
8 months (design to launch)

Impact
The revamped settings in SimplePractice dramatically enhanced user navigation, resulting in a 90% reduction in customer support requests.

Context & Background

What’s SimplePractice ?

SimplePractice is a cloud-based Electronic Health Record (EHR) software designed primarily for healthcare professionals, such as therapists, counselors, and psychologists. Essentially, SimplePractice aims to streamline administrative tasks and improve efficiency for healthcare providers, allowing them to focus more on patient care.

What are we solving for?

Over the years, SimplePractice has rapidly expanded its features, leading to a proliferation of settings pages. This growth has created an inconsistent experience, making it difficult for users to find the right settings and understand the necessary actions.

Problem space

To identify key challenges, we conducted user interviews, analyzed past feedback, and gathered insights from customer service teams. This process revealed two primary pain points:

Navigation and Discovery:

  • The current architecture is difficult to navigate, making it challenging to locate desired settings.

  • Key issues: Unclear page titles, hidden tabs, and frequent cross-navigation.

Intuitiveness:

  • Settings are often not where users expect them to be and may not function as intended.

  • Key issues: Confusing page structures, inconsistent terminology, and complex nested permissions.

What are our goals?

To solve for these user issues and ensure that this problem does not arise in the future, we broke down our goals into 3 areas of focus

GOAL 1

Enhance Discoverability and Navigation: Ensure settings are easily accessible and understandable, considering factors like naming conventions, navigation structures, and accessibility guidelines.

GOAL 2

Prioritize Intuitiveness: Provide clear and relevant context for settings, grouping related items together. Users should not be expected to understand complex interdependencies between settings.

GOAL 3

Establish Setting Standards: Develop a comprehensive guide outlining principles and templates for creating consistent, up-to-date, and valuable settings pages.

How might we break this work down to deliver the most value quickly?

To optimize for delivering value quickly, we broke this effort down into 2 phases

PHASE 1

  • Optimize Settings for Workflow: Reorganize settings pages to align more closely with a clinician's daily tasks.

  • Group Related Settings: Structure content within settings pages to place similar items together, enhancing usability.

  • Use Clear and Concise Language: Rename pages and write descriptions using plain language that is easy to understand.

  • Establish Setting Standards: Create a template and define guidelines for all settings pages to ensure consistency and maintainability.

PHASE 2

  • Align Pages with Template: Ensure individual settings pages adhere to the established template, providing a consistent visual and functional experience.

  • Address Inconsistencies: Resolve any discrepancies in both the visual design and content presentation across different settings pages.

  • Enhance Page Relevance: Improve the content within each settings page to make it more informative and relevant to users' needs.

Please note, that the reminder of this case study will only focus on Phase 1 of this work.

What did we build?

To validate our design concepts, I created early mockups and prototypes. Through multiple rounds of user testing and iterative refinement, we incorporated valuable feedback to enhance the user experience.

Workflow-based sections

We reduced the number of sections from seven to three to better align with clinician workflows:

  • Operations: Administrative settings related to practice management.

  • Billing: Settings for billing, payment processing, and service management.

  • Client Care: Settings for scheduling, documentation, and communication with clients.

Enhanced Settings Navigation

  • Consolidated Tabs: All tabs were converted into standalone pages that can be easily found within the settings navigation.

  • Organized Groups: Similar settings pages were grouped together based on their functions, simplifying navigation.

  • Expandable Groups: Groups can be expanded or collapsed within the settings navigation menu without requiring users to leave their current page.

Streamlined settings structure

  • Reorganized Pages: Settings pages were restructured to group similar items together, improving navigation and clarity.

  • Page Migration: Settings were moved to their appropriate groups within the settings navigation.

  • Tab Consolidation: Contents of related tabs were combined into single pages to reduce complexity.

  • Tab Splitting: Tabs were divided into multiple pages when necessary to ensure clarity and prevent information overload.

  • Visual Cues: Icons were introduced for each settings page to enhance visual consistency and aid in recognition.

  • Informative Descriptions: Page descriptions were added to provide users with a brief overview of the content before clicking.

  • Descriptive Page Names: Page names were updated to accurately reflect their contents, improving discoverability.

Repositioning Marketing

  • Enhanced Visibility: We recognized that marketing settings were not easily accessible to users. To address this, we moved the marketing section to the main navigation, making it more prominent and discoverable.

  • User Education: We identified a lack of understanding about marketing features among our users. To improve comprehension, we implemented enhancements to the marketing pages, including a redesigned interface, providing clearer information and guidance.

Establishing standards

Template Creation: To ensure consistency and maintainability, we developed a template for settings pages that will be applied to future redesigns.

Settings Principles

  • Settings: Settings should primarily serve as a control panel for users, rather than a source of product information.

  • Global vs. Local: Maintain a distinction between global settings that affect the entire product and local settings that are specific to individual contexts (e.g., services, clients).

  • Minimal Permissions: Avoid creating complex permission structures that require multiple levels of activation. If necessary, clearly communicate any related permissions to users.

  • Selective Settings: Offer only the essential settings to provide users with control without overwhelming them.

  • Information Reuse: Minimize redundant data entry by auto-populating information whenever possible and requesting confirmation from users.

  • Contextual Settings: Display only relevant settings based on a user's permissions and current context. Inform users about how they can gain access to additional features if needed.

Impact

SimplePractice's enhanced settings and marketing features have resulted in a dramatic improvement in user satisfaction. Customer support requests have decreased by 90%, and quarterly active marketing viewers have increased by 238%