Catherine Sterck is a Belgian psychologist and mind-body therapist. She practices in Brussels (Belgium) and has more than 20 years of experience in psychoanalysis.
Cath wanted a custom website, a calendar widget, emails and an entire brand. I worked remotely in pair with a developer specialised in the latest technologies in Belgium to create everything from scratch. We took the opportunity to create a fully-custom plugin and created a mini Design System.
Cath wanted a website with lots of information, animations, a light/dark version, and a fully-custom calendar plugin so that she could manage easily her schedule.
I had the chance to know a developer specialised in the latest technologies to build this plugin. We did everything remotely and worked in an Agile environment by using Miro and Zoom softwares.
There were 3 main focus with this project.
As the client had no idea about the content, we remotely organised a workshop with the developer and the client and setup the objectives, a vision and the values. We then imagined all the problems a client’s patient would have and how to fix them. To do so, we did a Crazy 8 and a How Might We workshop. If you want to know more about those techniques, see my other Case Study here.
I built the website in 4 pages: homepage - about me - pricing - get in touch. When doing the benchmark I noticed that the psychology sites are very similar. They have huge images of plants and are very colourful. As I always like to be original, the client trusted me to make something completely different from the competition.
This is for the website. I then organised a workshop with the developer to think - both of us - of a solution for the calendar plugin. How to give the possibility to anyone to book easily a massage or therapy session in a few steps, only by giving his/her name and email address. And give him/her the possibility to cancel the appointment easily as well.
Now that we thought designs, it was time to sketch some wireframes of our website and our plugin.
I went on Balsamiq and designed 17 screens for the plugin and 4 screens for the website (content and error states included).
We then tested the flow among a panel of 6 people and modified the wireframes after collecting the different feedbacks.
Let’s give life to those wireframes! I searched for inspirations among Hopper and Abstract among others. I then proposed a minimalist and abstract brand direction and designed a logo for the client.
I opted for simple shape-illustrations with one main colour and strong textures in the shadows. The style is abstract and inspired from the Bauhaus movement.
I designed all the illustrations of the website. They are available in Light and Dark version and are animated in After Effect. I used Lottie files. These are an incredible extension created by Airbnb. I could easily create all my designs, export them in JSON and use them easily with React. No need for a developer to animate my designs from scratch! Thanks Airbnb, you made our life easier!
I used free-source illustrations for the plugin. I found those illustrations perfect for the calendar! You can find them here.
Because I wanted our site to be different from the other psychology sites, I imagined lots of interactions based on scroll. I wanted to tell a story. Others animations are based on click/tap like the buttons.
I designed more than 100 screens for the website, the plugin and the emails (Light and Dark style, error states included).
I usually prototype with Principle to animate my designs but took the opportunity to try Protopie, another prototyping tool that is getting popularity in the world of designers. Protopie has the particularity to accept the Lottie files. How did I feel using it? That was dope!
Together with my fellow colleague developer, we took the opportunity to design a mini design system (Light & Dark) that will help us to be a lot faster for similar future projects. Gatsby is a framework based on React that helps developers build blazing fast websites and apps. It has a huge success in the Tech world. Next time we’ll be way faster to build solutions based on our templates!
The website and the plugin will be ready in August 2020. Then we will sell the plugin in different platforms for anyone who would like to have an easy booking calendar widget for their website.
Working remotely was an amazing experience. I had no doubt about it and I found myself even more efficient than working in an office. We have the chance to be in an era that gives us free tools like Miro, Trello, Slack or even Zoom. The workshops were timed and the collaboration went extremely smooth - with the developer and the client. I will definitely work remote again if I have the opportunity!
