Kapwa Therapy, led by Joanna (Jay) DeRosa, LMHC, is a therapy practice dedicated to providing affordable, culturally-aware mental health services to historically underrepresented and underserved clients.
My client, Joanna (Jay) DeRosa, LMHC founded Kapwa Therapy with the goal of providing affordable, socially-aware mental health counseling and music therapy to diverse communities.
Jay approached me in April 2024 to create a website and brand identity for her practice. She wanted to evolve Kapwa Therapy beyond the standard Psychology Today profile and establish her own website with the goal of reaching more potential clients and demonstrating that Kapwa Therapy is more than just a copy/paste therapy practice.
The primary goal was to design and develop a brand identity and website that would effectively communicate Kapwa Therapy’s mission while providing a welcoming experience.
This involved creating a cohesive brand identity and a design system that aligned with my client's vision of creating a sense of connection between her and her prospective clients.
Web Designer
Brand Strategist
Start: April 2024
End: August 2024
Research
Brand design and strategy
UX design
Figma
FigJam
Framer
Zoom
In order to get an understanding of what Kapwa Therapy's brand and website design would require, I knew I needed to better my understanding of the industry and user space that I was designing for. Before diving into discovery, I determined the specific areas that I needed to investigate to keep me on the right track:
Understand the industry trends in the mental health space
Identify the needs of the target client base that Kapwa Therapy aimed to reach
Understand how individuals seeking mental health services tend to find providers in the digital space
Identify any barriers of to mental health care access that may exist in the digital space
As highlighted in my research goals, I knew I needed to learn more about industry standards in the mental health space, specifically for provider and practice websites. I decided to perform a competitive analysis against for provider websites to identify common themes, being sure to take note of any strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.
I decided to compare 4 different provider websites that had similar offerings and client bases to my client.
The insights gathered from this exercise provided me with key information regarding what features would need to be included in Kapwa Therapy's website as well as features that we would want to avoid as they could create hinderances for the client experience.
After conducting the competitive analysis, I took the findings back to my client so we could discuss the them further and land on the must-have features for her website.
After reviewing these findings, we landed on the following:
Ensure Kapwa Therapy's website communicates its offerings clearly so that potential clients can determine compatibility quickly and with ease
Provide potential clients with the ability to book a consultation directly from Kapwa Therapy's website
Provide a dedicated FAQ section that addresses any additional information that potential clients may need access to
Based on the findings from my industry research and competitive analysis, I identified common patterns and page layouts to use as inspiration for Kapwa Therapy's website. Since Kapwa Therapy would be a simple website in nature (user journey is straightforward, interactions are minimal, navigation is straightforward, etc.), I felt confident proposing the basic layouts shown below.
Once I had an idea of the overall structure of the website, the question now was - what does Kapwa Therapy look like? I needed to work with my client to align on a vision for the look and feel of Kapwa Therapy before trying to iterate in high fidelity.
After a collaboration session with my client, we landed on these themes: welcoming, natural, minimalistic.
With those themes in mind, I created Kapwa Therapy's Brand and UI Design System shown below.
This project was certainly one for the books. Most of my work pertains to projects in the B2B and e-commerce space so it was really exciting to take a step back from that perspective and work on something more personal for a local therapist. In addition to this project being fun and exciting, it also gave me the opportunity to learn new skills (this was my first Framer site!) and really hone my research skills.
In 4 months, I:
Conducted industry research and discovery at length in the mental health space
Createded a comprehensive competitive analysis to drive my design decisions
Collaborated directly with my client to come up with a brand vision and website design system
Launched Kapwa Therapy using Framer
Because of the rushed timeline on this project, I wasn't able to hit every milestone that I had originally planned for. When working against the clock, there's always too little time and too many opportunities, so I made the decision to stick to only the steps I've outlined in this case study.
If I had more time to work on this, I would have loved to continue working on the following:
Conduct design validation tests and usability tests
Create more personalized brand assets such as custom illustrations and icons
Create more unification regarding the copy used across the website and evaluating how language impacts client booking rates
