This page is maintained by the 
- Our Online Courses
- 👀 Why we have built Hellobetter?
- 🎯 Target group
- 💫 What is the HelloBetter experience?
- Course Overview
- 💁 Psychological guidance
- 👩🎨 Design Principles
- 🌍 The HelloBetter Platform
- 🖥️ Patient Web App
- 📱Patient Mobile App
- 🤸🏻 Mobile VS Desktop experience
- 🧑⚕️Therapist Web App
- ⚒️ Backoffice App
- 👨🎨 In house CMS
- 🚀 Configurable Project management
- 🤖 Main Patient Features
- 🖥️ Dashboard
- 📘 Course
- ✒️ Journals
- 🤸🏻 Activity Planning
- 💬 Patient / Coach communication
- 🚀 BetterBox
- 👀 Patient Timeline
- 🤒 Symptom Check
Our Online Courses
Learn more about our online courses on our website.
👀 Why we have built Hellobetter?
Mental healthcare systems are globally inadequate: while mental health disorders are on the rise, the vast majority of patients are not reached by traditional solutions. Patients struggle with inconvenience and avoidable suffering, such as a lack of availability, inadequate treatment, long waiting times as well as a lack of flexibility in time and place of therapists. At the same time, health insurance companies deal with high direct as well as indirect costs due to expensive traditional face-to-face therapy, sick leave payments as well as late, inadequate or unnecessary treatment.
In regards to the ongoing pandemic, the importance of digital treatment options in the field of mental health was emphasized again. Now more than ever, it is important to provide people with effective digital tools to manage their mental health problems. With our scientifically proven psychological online courses, we empower people with mental health problems to maintain and improve their mental well-being in a self-determined way– anywhere and at any time, with no waiting lists.
🎯 Target group
We cover screening, prevention, treatment and aftercare and offer online courses for a broad range of mental disorders. We, hence, address people with subclinical symptoms as well as people with more severe symptoms as traditional solutions are not always effective and often inaccessible to the majority of those in need.
Our therapeutics are integrated into a comprehensive stepped care model, starting with the identification of symptom severity, the selection of the appropriate guidance level and, if necessary, further additional support. Depending on individual preferences and symptom severity the user can choose to receive extra guidance from an online coach, who will assist the user for three months in form of initial telephone consultation and written feedback after each completed course unit.
💫 What is the HelloBetter experience?
We combine technology with psychological content, daily activities, writing exercises and individual coaching to create highly engaging, yet scalable digital therapeutics. Clients learn and reflect during weekly sessions and actively engage with the course through various interactive features that require their input as well as written exercises. The course is adaptive, experience-oriented and individualised according to the clients' interests and prior screening results. They apply what they have learned in daily habit-building tasks and receive therapist (minimal written guidance by a personal psychologist of HelloBetter’s team) support to answer questions and improve adherence.
- Interactive - The clients actively engage with the course through various interactive features that require their input as well as written exercises.
- Concentrated - In 6-8 weeks, essential methods are dealt with intensively over several weeks instead of rolling out a new topic each week.
- Personalised - The course is adaptive, experience-oriented and individualised according to the clients' interests and prior screening results.
- Sustainable - The course is designed for sustainable behavioural change. Therefore access to the course is guaranteed for a full year.
- Hands-on - Taking a course means trying things out and seeing the progress (e.g. through transfer tasks, diaries, reflection and adjustments based on real-life experiences).
- Accompanied - Our psychotherapists support our participants with feedback (written or through a hotline) depending on their needs, thus guaranteeing their adherence as well as the effectiveness of the course.
- You are not alone - Authentic example persons, created from real patient interviews and psychotherapeutic case reports, accompany the participants with their story and serve as a role model and orientation for the exercises.
Team Product Course Overview
Treatment courses
Prevention courses
💁 Psychological guidance
HelloBetter coaches are providing light-touch guidance. The product is available in a guided and unguided version, meaning with and without human interaction. HelloBetter recommends the guided pathway because it increases the adherence and effectiveness of the courses. On the guided pathway, the psychologist needs on average one to two hours per client during the 6-8 week course. Besides an optional onboarding call, clients and coaches interact asynchronously in writing. To ensure the quality of service, all psychologists in the HelloBetter service team have a Master’s degree in psychology and are at least in the final stages of their training as psychotherapists, or are already trained psychotherapists.
👩🎨 Design Principles
Our product design principles are closely integrated with our mission, brand values and brand character.
Approachable
Psychotherapy is a deeply personal process, where empathy and compassion are key. Since our therapeutic relationships happen at a distance through digital media, we put in some extra effort to create a sense of approachability in anything we design. This is achieved through our warm colour palette, softening of shapes, human illustrations, and clear presentation of complex information.
Trustworthy
Trust is a fundamental requirement for any therapeutic process. We need patients to trust our interventions so that they follow through and stay with us until the end, even if things get difficult along the way. Gaining their trust and maintaining throughout the entire process (signup, onboarding, course undertaking, post course completion, messaging touch points) is our core objective.
Effective
We use highly effective tools such as cognitive behavioural therapy, and the effectiveness of our courses is scientifically proven. This principle also extends to the individual components of the product we design; the way in which our users digest the tools must be effective itself. All our decisions, right down to the placement of text and buttons, should be effective.
🌍 The HelloBetter Platform
We have built a set of applications to provide the best experience to all stakeholders: our patients, therapists and employees.
🖥️ Patient Web App
The original versions of the HelloBetter courses were designed to be used on desktop. for the first 2/3 years most of our functionalities and courses were only available on the desktop app. However this has been changing as of late as we have been pushing to expand our mobile experience.
📱Patient Mobile App
Due to limited resources and extreme time constraints, the patient mobile app was first conceived as a ‘companion’ app, empowering the user to implement his or her learnings in daily life.
The app was then focusing on features such as Journaling, activity planner, screening and chat.
However, thanks to big push in 2022 our mobile app is getting close to be at par with our web app, only missing the user account management as well as some of the course for our smaller projects.
🤸🏻 Mobile VS Desktop experience
We are continuously thriving to bring our mobile experience to be on par or even more advanced than our desktop experience. There are 2 main types of mobile experience
Web Responsive: allowing our web app to be usable on smaller screen through a web based browser
- Courses: All of our DVG courses are responsive. They can be done both on a web browser. The course is hence the same as on desktop, just "squeezed” into a smaller screen.
- Features: Our signup, onboarding and dashboard are responsive. However to use our journal, timeline or activity planner we ask the user to download the app and do it there
Native mobile: our Hellobetter iOS or Android mobile apps
- Courses
- Native: We have finally finished the migration of all our courses to a native environment. The UX components have been slightly redesigned from their responsive counterpart when needed to improve the experience
- Mobile first: We have built 2 "mobile first”courses: “Fit im Stress” and "depression prevention”. Mobile first means that the entire course and experience was conceived with having mobile in mind first and foremost. These 2 courses are quite radically different than their original desktop counterparts. As of now they are only available on mobile and not on desktop / responsive format.
🧑⚕️Therapist Web App
We created a distinct therapist app to empower our coaches to provide the best care to our users.
The main purpose of this app is for our coaches to easily review the progress of their users (course, screening results, journal entries, toolbox exercises etc..) and provide written feedback.
We have also implemented a task management system to remind our coaches when certain actions need to be taken (send a feedback message, have an introductory call etc..).
Head practitioners also have dedicated tools at their disposal to perform Quality Assurance as well as manage the workload of their teams.
We have built-in a suite of tools and services that allows the head practitioner to grow their team effortlessly. That includes the capacity among other things too:
- Dynamically and automatically adjust workload of each coach (Round Robin + overwrite custom logics)
- Access all coaches’ communication and feedback for quality assurance and training purposes
- Manage absences - set replacements and automatically inform the patient
The longer-term vision of this app is to make it accessible to every mental health professional that wishes to perform blended therapy and wants to follow the progress of their patients on our courses.
This is already happening with one of our Swiss telemedicine client who are prescribing our courses to their patients directly from the app, using it to follow and coach them throughout the course. They are apparently extremely satisfied with it 😊
⚒️ Backoffice App
The backoffice app is Hellobetter secret weapon. On top of performing the usual functions of backoffice (user management etc..) it does a few more things that make us very scalable... and probably a lot more scalable than many of our competitors.
👨🎨 In house CMS
Create a new course in hours and not days
Our proprietary WYSIWYG editors empower our content team to technically implement a new course in a few hours, without any code nor help from the technical team.
This is deemed possible thanks to our headless, JSON-based CMS.
Our software also includes a Review & Publish mode to manage content according to MDR regulations, as well as a versioning functionality based on GIT.
This application can also be safely shared with external partners as part of research projects or licensing deals.
🚀 Configurable Project management
Onboard new clients in minutes
The main purpose of these features is to empower our business development team to sign and onboard new clients without any help from the tech team.
Everything is configurable in our in-house back office in a few clicks. Each project is created modularly with specific:
- Courses
- Guidance options
- Therapists
- Signup URL
- Signup fields
- Consent requirements
- Onboarding steps (what steps in what order)
- Screenings (what screening and where)
- Additional modules
- Signup codes
- Double opt-in
And more…
🤖 Main Patient Features
🖥️ Dashboard
Easy access to the next step in your journey
The dashboard allows the user to see at a glance his current progress in the course and the most useful information or call to action at this point in the journey.
These can include a notification from the coach, a prompt to undertake a symptom check, suggestions of activities you could do etc...
📘 Course
The core of the Hellobetter experience!
Our interactive courses are made up of 6-8 weekly lessons. They include a mix of multimedia (audio, text, expert videos, animated videos) and interactive content (text input, single and multi-select, sort, quiz etc...).
We also include the concept of ‘coursemates’ which are characters sharing their experience every step of the way by providing their own answers to the questions. They are very popular with our users as they help them to understand the question and get inspired with the answer. These coursemates are fictional but the content is based on real-life stories and experiences.
✒️ Journals
Keep track of your reflections and progress
Our journals let our users keep track of their symptoms, thoughts and progress on a daily basis.
A journal is made of one or multiple entry types (mood level, stress level, tension level, sleep pattern, alcohol consumption etc..).
Our journals are praised for their meaningful allegories and engaging designs.
Every journal is course-specific. We currently offer:
- Mood Journal
- Sleep Journal
- Chronic Pain Journal
- Panic Journal
- Alcohol Journal
- Vaginismus Journal
🤸🏻 Activity Planning
Plan and track your energisers during & after the course
Planning and doing motivating activities is a key principle to Hellobetter’s therapeutic approach.
It has been scientifically proven that empowering users to plan energising activities, also called ‘boosters’ or ‘energisers’ helped them gain and maintain a high level of motivation throughout the course, increasing in turn its adherence level and therapeutic efficacy.
💬 Patient / Coach communication
Direct access to your coach from anywhere
Our courses can be done entirely autonomously or can be followed by a dedicated HelloBetter coach, guiding the user step by step and providing written feedback after each lesson.
Introductory messages and phone calls are also available, as well as on-demand chat features.
All the various coaching options (guided, unguided, on-demand, intro call etc…) are configurable on a project basis in a few clicks directly from the HelloBetter back office.
🚀 BetterBox
👀 Patient Timeline
Integrate the course learnings in your daily life
Provide the users with the most valuable exercise and therapeutic content from the course and from our editorial team straight in an easily accessible toolbox. This content includes
- Exercises from the course
- Audio content
- Video content
- Therapeutic concepts
- Machine Learning based recommended Articles from our HelloBetter blog (400+ articles to date)
The BetterBox used to be called ‘Toolbox’ and was originally just an internal joke (thanks Lena!).. until we discovered that it was our user’s favourite name for it! And since we listen to our users, the BetterBox was born...
One of our most asked-for features
Let our patients review their progress throughout the course including all of their input and learnings:
- Course exercises inputs
- Activities
- Lesson completions
- Feedback from the Coach
- Homework completed
- All Journal entries
🤒 Symptom Check
Provide users deep insights into their mental health state
We provide a user-friendly way for our users to complete a symptom check before, during and after the course.
The characteristics of the symptom are project and course-specific and can be configured in our back office, in particular with the following:
- Location of the 1st screening (onboarding, dashboard)
- List of standard questionnaires included in the screening (PHQ8, PSS 4 etc..)
- Guidance level based on specific questionnaire score
- Occurrence of follow up checks (by default every 2 weeks)