A unified practice management platform for counsellors

Counsellors were spending too much time navigating unreliable software to prepare for sessions and document care. When TELUS Health moved its counselling tools to Microsoft Dynamics 365, I led the design of a workspace organised around their daily work.

The immediate mandate was to preserve the legacy tools’ capabilities. Research showed an opportunity to go further: keep related client information together and make preparation and documentation easier. That shaped three connected changes: a client-folder navigation model, a pre-session summary, and a chronological clinical-note history.

The workspace rolled out to approximately 250 counsellors. Internal reliability complaints fell by over 80%, and counsellors reported saving around five minutes of preparation per session. But the early improvement in satisfaction did not last. We migrated users before key workflows were ready, and delayed improvements damaged their trust.

Our first task was to make sure counsellors could do everything in the new system that they could in the old one. But copying the old tools would also mean bringing along the things that made them frustrating to use. We wanted to use the move as a chance to fix some of those problems.

We weren’t starting from scratch. A few months earlier, I’d led a study of the existing tools and how counsellors used them. It showed where unreliable software interrupted their work and where confusing steps made it harder than it needed to be. Our small design team used that research to decide which problems to tackle first.

Our goal was to make the workspace more intuitive, efficient, and reliable while keeping the client’s information close at hand. Counsellors needed to move between preparation, care, and documentation without repeatedly piecing the client’s story back together.

Organising the platform around the counsellor's day

Research helped us identify the activities that occupied most of a counsellor’s day. We used those activities to organise workshops across design, engineering, product, and clinical teams, keeping discussions grounded in the work the platform needed to support.

This gave us a practical way to evaluate design decisions: could counsellors get ready for a session, find the information they needed during it, and document care afterwards? Those needs shaped the navigation, client summary, and clinical notes explored below.

Defining the target experience

I mapped out how the new workspace could support a counsellor from planning their day to documenting a session. We used that map to check whether our ideas worked together, rather than making one task easier and another harder.

Our early concepts followed a drill-down structure: counsellors opened a client record, then an appointment, then its attached clinical note. Each opened as a separate screen. The back button retraced that path, while the side menu linked to top-level sections.

By the time a note was open, the client-level navigation was no longer visible. The note still belonged to the client, but the interface did not make that relationship clear. Counsellors had to remember whose record they were in and retrace their steps to reach related information.

I worked with engineering to organise the workspace like a client folder (a manila folder). The metaphor also helped us explain the new system. It gave counsellors something familiar to relate to, especially those who were less comfortable learning new software.

Keeping related work within the client record gave us a foundation for the next design decisions. Initial feedback was promising, and the new structure made full client summary views possible.

Bringing session preparation into one view

Before a session, counsellors had to check several tabs to piece together what had happened with a client. Each move between screens triggered another load. The information was there, but getting ready took more time and effort than it should have.

We worked with counsellors to bring the information they needed before a session into one summary: recent assessments, care progress, available services, platform activity, clinical history, and risk alerts. They could still open the full records when they needed more detail.

Designing clinical notes for ongoing care

The appointment-based structure also made it hard to follow care over time. Counsellors needed to read across sessions, not just review one appointment in isolation.

Instead of making counsellors open each appointment to find its notes, I proposed showing the notes together across the client’s ongoing care. Working with engineering, we linked them into one chronological history, so counsellors could read back through previous sessions without opening each appointment.

Moving in this direction wasn't just good for our counsellors; it was good for the business. The client-facing product being worked on in parallel was prioritising longer-term mental health support as a market differentiator. The notes improvement helped our counsellors deliver that type of service better.

We ran satisfaction surveys (CSAT) with counsellors twice a year to evaluate the design and track how they felt about the workspace over time. Alongside their feedback, we looked at reliability complaints and the time they reported spending on session preparation.

The early improvement in counsellor satisfaction did not last.

We launched an MVP knowing that some workflows had not yet reached the usability bar set by the legacy tools. The plan was to close those gaps through iteration. I had also shown clinical leadership a more complete vision that included a care-plan portal and simplified booking. The target experience had helped align the team, but we had not managed the expectations around how quickly we could deliver it.

When resources shifted to accommodate the needs of a large B2B client, those improvements were delayed. We did not properly reset user expectations or reconsider the platform's rollout plan. The difference between the experience we had shown and what we could deliver damaged trust with counsellors and clinical leadership.

Losing their trust really hurt. When counsellors felt heard and could see that we cared about their needs and were making progress, they were willing to work through the smaller issues that come with a new platform. Once they felt we were no longer listening, they stopped giving us the benefit of the doubt. Every issue carried more weight and change management became much harder.

That experience changed how I approach platform transitions.

As this was a multi-year project, there was a lot more to it than what's been highlighted here. If you'd like to know more about any particular area, please feel free to reach out. Our team also tackled administrative UI/UX for handling client contracts and worked on streamlining UI/UX for our trauma counsellors.

I came away knowing that a better interface isn’t enough. People also need to be able to do their work when they move over, and to trust what you tell them is coming next.

Over this multi-year project, the design team’s working practices evolved alongside our collaboration with the wider team.

We balanced customer requests, technical opportunities and constraints, clinical reporting needs, and user feedback. That could be frustrating, but it taught me how to advocate for UX when product teams were under pressure. Good UX meant making the strongest choices possible with the time and resources available.

I wrote more about that experience in a brief article on advocating for UX in a large product team.