Syndi works with referral channels such as employers and insurers to provide their members with a personalised mental health service recommendations. Unlike other solutions that either infringe the individual’s privacy or dictate a one-size-fits all solution, referral channels provide their users with access and a budget to allow them to find the right services for them privately. Users simply complete an assessment and explore recommendations, by tracking their health scores over time users are able to find a service that meets their needs effectively. In turn, anonymised data is provided back to both the digital health services and referral channels so that they can improve internally. Ultimately, this re-shapes the digital mental health eco-system to compete based on clinical impact rather than marketing budgets. 

My Role & Achievements with Syndi Health

Role

Syndi is a pre-seed start up and I was the only full time product designer at the organisation. My role spanned across the entire new product development process. Typically, this required initiating new feature development by running workshops with clinicians, commercial teams and developers to scope opportunities. Once the aims and constraints were established, I was responsible for planning and executing UX research processes which would usually require customer discovery interviews and designing prototypes and surveys for un-moderated validation using online user testing tools. Finally, once a proposition or feature was validated as commercially viable, technically feasible and desirable for end-users I would transform prototypes into pixel-perfect, production-ready UI designs and work with developers to ensure an optimal implementation.

Achievements

• Leading a multi-disciplinary team through the exploration and validation of an integrated payment solution to enable organisations to provide their members with a mental health budget. This process resulted in Syndi becoming one of two partners in Europe selected by Stripe to participate in their partner programme and the launch of SyndiCard as Syndi’s flagship new feature of 2022. This accelerated the adoption of Syndi as an EAP for SMEs.

• UX and UI design of Syndi’s first partner portals. These enabled partnering organisations to autonomously launch and monitor Syndi with their teams. As well as allowing digital health services featured on Syndi to manage their solution’s presence on the platform and view anonymised data about their service’s impact on end users.

• Building Syndi’s first comprehensive design system with a library of custom MUI components in order to ensure a consistent user experience across the product and radically improve the pace of development within Syndi. I also established a number of tools, processes and principles for UX research in order to accelerate the time between value proposition discovery and the delivery of validated user flows.

• Identified education as a critical missing component of Syndi’s offering based on discovery interviews with users who had limited knowledge of mental health. This opportunity was then transformed into a new ‘Insights’ feature and resulted in increased user satisfaction scores.

• Worked with my product manager to undertake an extensive review of user data through HotJar in order to identify opportunities to improve returning user rates. After brainstorming and prioritising ideas, we were able to release a range of design interventions which nearly doubled returning user rates.

• Mapped out an end-to-end service blueprint for onboarding SMEs onto Syndi. The process was designed in Miro and I engaged with every stakeholder in the process to incorporate their knowledge and carefully detail the assets and responsibilities required for each step. At various stages in the project, I managed and mentored junior team members from marketing and sales to teams.

Process Use Case: SyndiCard

Syndi’s core offering of providing clinical mental health assessments and using machine learning to recommend digital services was largerly proven desirable to end users. The business model however was reliant on sharing revenue with digital services featured on the platform and was not demonstrating enough commercial traction for investors. 

Based on this limitation, Syndi pivoted to focus on working with commercial organisations such as employers and insurers. After some initial trials and stakeholder workshops, we were able to identify enabling organisations to provide their users with a mental health budget as the critical missing value proposition. With this simple starting point, I was briefed to lead a customer discovery and user research process to identify the B2B and B2C user flows to bring this feature into Syndi’s product. I would need to engage with technical and legal teams to understand the constraints of available fin-tech tools as well as collaborate with Syndi’s commercial team to ensure that any solution would fit into an organisation’s HR & operational processes.

What follows is an overview of the process that took the team from an initial hypothesis to being Syndi’s flagship feature release for 2022. 

SyndiCard is a now a critical value proposition and has enabled Syndi to expand into new markets working with private organisations and insurers. Its success has radically improved Syndi’s ability to demonstrate commercial traction and will significantly improve their chance of raising their next round of investment.

If you would like to know more about Syndi health and its products, you can visit their website here.