Cerebral
Onboarding
My roles
UX Writer, Content Designer, Copywriter
Here are some of the ways I improved the Cerebral onboarding experience.
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Collaborated with
Product and UX Designers, Product Managers, legal stakeholders, Marketing stakeholders, and Clinical leadership
Duration
Oct 2021–Apr 2023 (1 year, 7 months)
Impact
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Increased likelihood of end-to-end onboarding by 76%.​
Challenges
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Diagnostic criteria too strict and alienating
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Lack of transparency around collecting sensitive information
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Lack of clarity around pricing structure and first month discount
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Copy too stiff, formal, and clinical - inappropriate for our vulnerable user base.
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"Create account" screen was not HIPAA-compliant​
Solutions and process
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Provided broader self-select diagnostic criteria
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Provided transparency in the form of clickable, informational pop-ups
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Wrote a cost breakdown screen to better explain pricing
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Made onboarding tone more empathetic, personalized, and less formal/clinical with introduction of the therapy-centric flow and revamped "crisis" screen
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Worked with legal and marketing to rewrite the sign-up screen to be both enticing to new clients and compliant with HIPAA standards​
More than diagnoses
Knowing a new client's diagnosis was important for our clinicians. However, not all new clients had a diagnosis. Some were even seeking support for the first time!
I worked with product designers, product managers, and clinical stakeholders to ensure clients could select an "Other" category and tell us in their own words what they needed help with.
Before
After
Later iterations of this screen also included different symptoms, situational stressors, and "feeling statements" that clients could select if they were not comfortable disclosing or identifying with a mental health diagnosis.
Supporting clients in crisis
Since we couldn't guarantee same-day appointments, we had to screen all new clients for suicide ideation and direct them to more immediate resources for care. Our copy for this call-out, however, was lacking a bit in the empathy department.
I collaborated with growth product managers, legal, and clinicians to write a new screen that properly supported clients in crisis, as well as provided them with more immediate options for faster care.
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Before implementation of the screen on the right, I also crafted a short survey to measure user reactions to the copy in terms of length, comprehension, and overall messaging. All participants (n=20) had previously experienced depression and suicidal thoughts.
Before
After
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About controlled substances
With ever-changing regulations for Telehealth companies, we needed to inform clients of about a change in our ability to prescribe controlled substances. This call-out screen was meant to ensure that new sign-ups weren't coming to us solely for these medications.
This screen went through multiple iterations and involved my seeking input from our marketing, clinical, and legal departments. It was eventually placed in front of the payment screen of the onboarding flow.
Staying HIPAA compliant
To protect our clients' PHI data, I worked with legal, marketing, and product managers to ensure that our sign-up screen didn't contain any clinical terminology, or "leading" language, such as words or phrases that implied a certain level of clinical care before the client was fully onboarded.
Before
After
Speeding up the process
To help more experienced mental health clients get to where they wanted to be more quickly, I worked with our product designers to write a screen that effectively sorted clients into categories of "I know what I want" and "I'm new to this and want to explore my options."
Product managers initially wanted these categories sorted into "Diagnosis" and "Continued care," under the assumption that new patients were coming to us mainly for the former and more experience patients for the latter. I felt that these categories lacked too much context to perform well—and was correct on this!
As such, this screen went through several iterations and ultimately involved extensive usability testing.
First iteration
Final screen
Insurance
To expedite the sign-up process and increase trust and transparency, we created an insurance landing page and separate branch of the onboarding flow that allowed clients to check their coverage before checkout.
Most of my efforts on this flow consisted of ensuring any informational copy was concise, helpful, and didn't overwhelm the client. My freedom to test any of this copy in terms of user comprehension and placement was unfortunately limited for this initiative.
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See more of my insurance work here.
Informational pop-ups
Research indicated that many of our clients were not comfortable with the amount of sensitive information we gathered during onboarding.
To improve transparency and decrease drop-off, we decided to add some explainers for questions that may be considered sensitive. We also wanted to ensure that this additional copy didn't clutter up the screens—particularly important for mobile!
I worked with designers to create clickable pop-ups that enabled clients to access more information about the question if needed.
Personalized and therapy-centric
With the ever-shifting telehealth market, Cerebral made the decision to redirect its marketing focus from medication to therapy subscriptions.
With this new therapy-centric onboarding flow, I took a more personalized approach to language by making the copy more conversational, addressing the client by name, and creating a narrative specific to the client's mental health journey and needs.
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You can view this full flow here, which includes user problems, solutions, and my justifications for content decisions.
Our current flow had a screen that allowed the client to self-select therapist preferences, but the choices were limited to ethnicity and religious/spiritual affiliation.
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Under the supervision of our clinical stakeholders, we used this initiative as an opportunity to rework this screen into individual questions. We also included additional background questions to show that Cerebral was committed to helping clients find a suitable therapist within our network.
*Note: this question was only shown if the client indicated they were part of the LGBTQ+ community