The service design challenge was one of my first serious UX projects in school. I chose to work with Zocdoc because the subject was not distant to me. I had experienced how difficult it could be to seek mental health care, and that made the brief feel less like an assignment and more like a real point of entry.

But my own experience could only take me so far. As a designer, I needed to separate what I personally felt from what the service needed to support more broadly. I began by mapping my own path through the experience, then treated that map as a hypothesis to test with people who had gone through similar journeys.

The project looked at therapy booking as a service problem, not just an interface problem. I examined the existing journey, spoke with patients and practitioners, and mapped where uncertainty began to accumulate across search, insurance, availability, comparison, booking, and preparation.

Three breakdowns kept surfacing: too much choice during search, weak support for comparing providers, and a fragile handoff at booking, where patients needed reassurance while providers needed clearer control and context.

Those findings shaped a more deliberate sequence: intake, results, shortlist, comparison, booking, and confirmation. Insurance and terminology moved earlier. Saving providers became a meaningful act of intent. Comparison became a response to uncertainty. The blueprint extended beyond the patient-facing screens to include provider readiness, confirmation, and the moments before the first visit.

What changed most was how I understood the problem. I stopped thinking in terms of screens and flows and started paying attention to the tension between two people trying to make the same decision from completely different positions of uncertainty.