The stigma surrounding mental health is a profound issue in Ghana, magnified by the stark reality of having a mere 64 psychiatrists serving the entire nation. As part of OKB Hope Foundation’s mental health initiative, we designed a website platform where Ghanaians can easily book appointments with, chat with, and video-call local psychiatrists.
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Patients filter through the database of psychiatrists, view and save their profiles, and book appointments through a Calendly integration.
Through their dashboard, patients view their upcoming appointments, saved psychiatrists, and mental health resource articles. They can also communicate with psychiatrists via instant messaging.
Psychiatrists sort through their past and upcoming appointments by calendar week and access meeting details and patient information. They can join video calls with patients which also have an in-chat messaging feature.
The stigma surrounding mental health is deeply ingrained within Ghanaian culture; it’s rarely talked about, and conversations surrounding it often fail to address its root cause, cultivate proper understanding, or create meaningful change.
The government of Ghana allocates very little funding toward mental health; with only 64 registered psychiatrists in the country, accessing their services proves challenging, particularly for those residing in remote areas where distances are considerable and resources limited. This difficulty is especially pronounced within low-income communities.
OKB Hope Foundation aims to transform healthcare in Ghana by providing essential clinical care, creating life-saving solutions, and teaching public health empowerment. Its Wohohiame Initiative — meaning “I care for you” in Twi, a Ghanaian language — aims to educate and equip the public, specifically students, with mental health resources.
We were tasked with building a platform that bridges patients with psychiatrists based on their preferences and needs, thereby fostering mental health awareness and improving access to vital mental health services. The website should serve as a place for people to easily schedule appointments, and chat with and video-call professional psychiatrists.
Although we conducted prior research on Ghana and discussed extensively with OKB Hope Foundation, we still needed to gain a deeper insight into the culture and perspectives of the individuals we were designing for. So, we set out to interview 10+ Ghanaian students, patients, and psychiatrists, followed by the creation of an affinity diagram to synthesize our findings.
From our user interviews, there were three key findings:
1. Patients often struggle to define what issues they’re experiencing due to misconceptions and stigma surrounding mental health.
Many Ghanaians do not know the official medical term for the mental health issue they are facing; they only know the feelings they experience. We must account for this when using medical terminology on our platform, making it accessible for even those who may not be sure what conditions like depression and anxiety actually are.
2. Patient confidentiality is extremely important and must be prioritized.
People are unwilling to meet with psychiatrists in person because of the stigma that surrounds mental health; many fear being ostracized from their families and communities.
3. There is a lot of variation in what people value in terms of the video-calling platform.
Most students in Ghana — our target audience — have access to laptops, although some interviewees expressed their desire for the video-call feature to be accessible on their phones, to make each session feel more comfortable and casual.
The general user flow determined was as follows:
We thus needed to make three different versions of the website: the patient side, psychiatrist side, and administration side that our partner would use.
We prioritized the patient and psychiatrist sides for our MVP, and realized that the former would be much more extensive than the latter. For example, patients need to be able to search for and view psychiatrist profiles, but not the other way around in order to maintain patient confidentiality.
We first designed a page for psychiatrists’ listings, making it easy for patients to discover and connect with psychiatrists that fit their needs.
We went forward with the horizontal cards to allow a larger portion of each psychiatrist’s biography to be shown. Our partner then notified us that there were initially going to be only a handful of psychiatrists on the platform, which removed the need for such a huge filtering feature on the page. After extensive discussion with our partner, we decided that there were only three criteria patients should be able to filter by, so we displayed the filters horizontally at the top of the page to optimize space.
When a user clicks on a psychiatrist, they are taken to a page that displays the description, availabilities, and contact information of the psychiatrist. We designed various ways to arrange the psychiatrist’s availability, which proved to be the most challenging task.
Ultimately, we organized the information vertically, with the psychiatrist's general information on top and the availabilities below.
Our biggest hurdle appeared when faced with the task of building a booking page for patients to schedule appointments. After some initial designs, our developers brought up concerns about feasibility.
Regardless of the appearance of our designs, implementing them would involve numerous steps:
Essentially, we would be building a calendar application from scratch.
With many other features to implement, we decided that this was not a good use of our developers’ time for the MVP. After looking into multiple popular scheduling tools such as Jotform and You Can Book Me, we ultimately decided to go forward with Calendly, the most popular scheduling tool on the market. The website retrieves psychiatrists’ availabilities via the Calendly integration, and when a patient is ready to book an appointment, they are brought to the Calendly external site.
By analyzing organizations offering similar services to OKB Hope (such as BetterMynd, Zomujo, and BetterHelp) we noticed a few features that we wanted to incorporate into our own designs, the most notable being a dashboard, which organizes and consolidates important information, making it easily accessible and manageable for the user.
Our initial dashboard designs included five main components:
Since patients receive email confirmations for each Calendly appointment booking, which inherently serves as documentation, we determined that an appointment history page was unnecessary for the MVP. Furthermore, our partner emphasized the importance of limiting appointment scheduling to a maximum of one month in advance. As a result, the dashboard should display a maximum of four upcoming appointments at any given time.
The fact that OKB Hope Foundation currently has only a limited number of registered psychiatrists renders both the “Best Match” and “Similar Psychiatrists” features impractical. Nonetheless, we wanted to provide patients with the ability to save psychiatrists, particularly with the anticipation of a future expansion in the pool of available mental health professionals.
In our final design, upcoming appointments are displayed vertically as this format aligns more intuitively with user expectations.
Our objective was to minimize the number of unique designs for the MVP, and a reexamination of the list of content requirements shows that the dashboard is the only distinct screen exclusive to the psychiatrist side of the website.
In contrast to the patient dashboard, the psychiatrist dashboard only functions as a space for professionals to access their scheduled appointments. Initial designs included the option to toggle between a list and grid layout as well as a daily and weekly view; psychiatrists could use the calendar on the right of the page to access their appointments for a specific day/week.
Unsurprisingly, we needed to cut back. User testing demonstrated a strong preference for the list layout over the grid layout, and the daily view of the dashboard had no practical application. By opting to present the dashboard on a weekly basis, we recognized that the option to sort by patients was excessive, given that patients are restricted to scheduling just one appointment per week. As a result, the final iteration appears considerably less cluttered.
While WhatsApp emerged as the favored communication method from our user interviews, we took steps to enhance patient confidentiality and psychiatrist privacy. To address this, we introduced an in-platform instant messaging feature, allowing patients to initiate contact with the psychiatrists they wished to engage with.
Numerous design conventions exist for messaging app interfaces, and we undertook comprehensive market research to gain a deeper understanding and take inspiration.
Key elements of any chat design include time stamps, a message input field, search functionality, notifications, profile pictures, and names — all of which we included in our design. To further enhance communication, we differentiated unread messages from read ones in the sidebar, guaranteeing that no psychiatrist overlooks a patient’s message. Additionally, from this messaging page, users can mark chats as unread, access psychiatrist profiles, book appointments, and delete message threads.
The messaging page is almost identical on the psychiatrist side, differing only in the way messages are accessed — exclusively through the navigation bar. Psychiatrists can only respond to patients who have initiated contact, as there is no way to reach out to or connect with patients otherwise.
From our user research, there were varying answers as to which video chat platform was the best for patient-to-psychiatrist connection. Some cited Zoom as superior for its formality, while others preferred WhatsApp — the most popular messaging app in Ghana — because of its casualness and familiarity. However, our client strongly suggested creating a video chat feature exclusively for the OKB Hope Foundation website.
At first, we considered providing all three options, allowing patients and psychiatrists to choose their preferred platform for meetings, with the intention of integrating all three into our site. However, this idea was ultimately abandoned due to its complexity and feasibility challenges, and we instead made the decision to implement an in-app video calling system for all users.
The developers used WebRTC, an open-source project providing web browsers with real-time video communication capabilities. With WebRTC — unlike typical video calling platforms such as Zoom or Google Meet — there is no host for the meeting and only two participants can join a meeting at once. Thus, there was no need to differentiate the patient and psychiatrist sides. Apart from this change, however, our designs were quite conventional, incorporating features such as a built-in messaging system and the option to mute one’s microphone and disable the camera.
We needed to come up with a way for the admin user to be able to view and control all users on the site.
Our final design allows admin users to toggle between viewing all patients and viewing all psychiatrists. Admin users can view user profiles and mass-select and delete users.
Our client then asked to add an analytics section offering admin users insights into website user base statistics and trends, as well as a report feature, providing psychiatrists and patients the ability to report inappropriate behavior as needed. These ideas will continue to be fleshed out and explored in the upcoming months.
This project has been the most significant source of personal and professional growth I’ve experienced thus far in my design career. Here are a few of my biggest takeaways:
As I leave to study abroad in Copenhagen this upcoming semester, I’ll be passing the torch to the new designers and developers on our team, who will finalize designs for the administrative side and implement all the designs we’ve painstakingly crafted over the past six months. I cannot wait to see our final product and the positive impact it will have on the mental health of Ghanaian communities.
My biggest thank you goes to the two other designers who worked on this project — Jenn and Naomi — as well as all the other designers on Hack4Impact and members of the OKB Hope Foundation team. Keep slaying! 🌎 ❤
