A unified practice management platform for counsellors

I led the design of a front-office platform for mental health counsellors, bringing scheduling, client records, care planning, and documentation into one connected experience. Built on Microsoft Dynamics 365

The organisational mandate was to maintain the capabilities of the legacy counselling tools while transitioning to a more extensible and performant technical foundation.

A few months earlier, I had led a performance and usability study on the legacy counsellor tools. We carried those findings into the new initiative and used them to set priorities for our small design team. The tools were a counsellor's daily driver, so every reliability issue and confusing workflow added friction to an already demanding job.

Our goal was to build a unified platform that felt more intuitive, efficient, and reliable without asking counsellors to abandon the way they understood their work.

One thing became clear pretty quickly. "Clean" interfaces were not what our counsellors needed. Traditional taxonomies and minimal screens looked organised, but they forced counsellors to navigate away from their client's record, resulting in them constantly losing context and their sense of virtual space.

Organising the platform around the counsellor's day

Early research helped us identify the primary activities that take up the most time in a counsellor's day. This became a shared reference point across design, engineering, product, and clinical workshops. It helped us keep the platform and team unified, guiding discussions and providing direction.

Defining the target experience

Expanding on these overarching themes, I put together an ideal workflow to align stakeholders and the product team. This was not a record of the existing experience or a detailed delivery plan. It was an aspirational flow that gave design, product, engineering, and clinical leadership a shared picture of where we wanted the platform to end up.

We used this flow as a north star in workshops and planning conversations. It helped us evaluate individual features against the complete provider experience and avoid improving one workflow at the expense of another.

A new information architecture that emphasised the client record

Early concepts used a more traditional drill-down/bubble-out navigation architecture. It worked, but repeatedly pulled counsellors away from their client's record and created uncertainty about where they were in the virtual space. It was also just less flexible for complex work. You couldn’t easily navigate from a specific assessment to your clinical note, for example.

I worked with our engineering team to replace that structure with layered sections modelled on a physical client folder (AKA a manila folder

manila folder

If you are clicking this, you must be under 25.
Let me give you a quick crash course.

Manila folders were how humans sorted and kept records before computers and even after computers. They have fallen out of fashion in the last 20 or so years due to the physical space they occupy and the inherent friction they present as physical items.

They do, however, offer a strong usability heuristic and traditionally did work effectively and intuitively.

I've included some images below to illustrate the user flow.

Just look at that smile!

Grounding the information architecture early helped define how we structured everything going forward. Initial feedback was promising, so we expanded some of our earlier assumptions. The client summary, for instance, wasn't a part of the initial build and was only made viable with this architectural rework.

Turn the client record into a pre-session view

The previous client record focused primarily on personal and demographic information. Assessments, care-plan activity, episodes of care, and benefit entitlements lived in separate tabs, adding friction to an already complex workspace. The underlying platform also just had some weird loading behaviour (every route change had to re-query the database) that exacerbated the issue. While our counsellors needed this information, it wasn't presented in a useful way. What they needed was a view to quickly get up to speed before a session.

Working with counsellors, we explored and workshopped a client summary dashboard, bringing the most decision-relevant and care-relevant information into one pre-session summary: assessment trends, care progress, service eligibility, platform activity, clinical history, and risk alerts. Deeper records remained available when needed.

Designing clinical notes for ongoing care

The old counsellor tools treated every clinical note as a separate record tied to an individual appointment. Initially, Dynamics 365 worked the same way. To review a client's history, counsellors had to open appointments one at a time and find the attached notes.

Working within the Dynamics 365 record structure, I proposed elevating appointment notes to the episode of care

We also introduced Jot Notes, a private space for reminders that supported rapport but did not belong in the formal clinical record. This was one of those little features that our counsellors really loved. The more counsellors felt the platform failed to meet their needs, the more likely they were to disengage. Providing utility and flexibility like this helped quite a bit with adoption.

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.

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.

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.

In summary, we succeeded in creating a more connected and reliable clinical workspace, but the rollout changed how I define product success. The interface, migration strategy, and delivery plan all shape the user's experience.

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.

Working on such an extended and iterative project the way the design team team worked and how we worked together with the larger team changed and shifted consistently.

Customer requests from product and leadership, Technical advantages and bottle necks from engineering, operational and reporting goals from clinical leadership, user feedback and UX counselling from design. It could be frustrating at times but it was a great learning experience in how to sell the value of UX to desperate product groups. Ultimately good UX is the best UX with the time and resources your have.

If you'd like to here me talk more about it I wrote a brief article here.