Transforming Student Mental Health Support
A Case Study on Maro for Schools
The Numbers
What You'll Learn
Maro for Schools is transforming the way schools approach preventative mental health, making it an integral part of student success. By streamlining mental health screenings, Maro helps schools identify students in need, teach resilience skills, and connect families to ongoing support.
With the newly redesigned Maro platform, counselors can now save hours of work by simplifying sign-ups, screenings, and referrals. This allows them to focus on what matters most—getting students the support they need when they need it.
Maro’s platform uses clinically validated tools to screen for depression, anxiety, and ADHD, helping schools detect at-risk students early and refer them to outside clinical support in minutes. By making mental health a priority, Maro is ensuring that students, educators, and families all play a role in fostering well-being in schools.
Counselors' Challenge
Counselors needed an intuitive and efficient way to manage student mental health screenings while juggling their daily responsibilities. The existing process was time-consuming and fragmented, making it difficult to prioritize and support students effectively.
3 Key Challenges
“No capacity to build practices even if they save time...”
Our Approach
When families and students face mental health challenges, even the smallest friction in accessing support can become a roadblock. We recognized a critical opportunity: improving the user experience could directly impact how many students receive the support they need.
By streamlining the Maro for Schools platform, we made it easier for counselors to navigate their daily tasks, ensuring that mental health resources reach students faster and more effectively.
Our Solution
Meet Jenna,
High School Counselor
Research & Testing
Helping Counselors Save Time
Counselors saved time with a more efficient sign-on process—merging 3 screens into 1 streamlined onboarding and set clear expectations for their time commitment. This improvement reduced friction, allowing them to focus more on supporting students.
Faster Support Through Mass Screenings
Adding self-guided and teacher-led mass screenings saved counselors hours of work, allowing them to detect students in need faster and connect them with clinical support sooner.
Simplifying the Screening Process
Optimized Screening with Automated Emails
Helping Counselors Stay Organized
Counselors juggle multiple tools daily, making it hard to stay on top of priorities. Our all-in-one dashboard streamlines their workflow with color-coded messages, calendar events, and an editable student referral list organized by risk level—ensuring they can quickly prioritize support and focus on what matters most.
Optimized Dashboard to Prioritize Tasks
Streamlined Referrals with Color-Coded Prioritization
Enhanced Guardian Communication
Counselors can now easily connect with guardians through multiple channels, including scheduled meetings via Calendly, as well as direct outreach through phone or text. This ensures faster, more efficient communication to support students in need.
Highlights
Counselors from public, private, and charter schools shared that time management, communication, and student support were their biggest challenges.
Obtaining guardian consent and efficiently referring students to outside clinical support were major pain points across different school types.
User research directly shaped our redesign, ensuring a more intuitive and streamlined experience for counselors.
Usability testing allowed us to refine key workflows, making screenings, referrals, and communication more efficient.
Our Outcome
With mental health challenges on the rise, it's more important than ever to ensure students get the support they need—when they need it. By streamlining the Maro School platform, we helped counselors stay organized, prioritize tasks, and conduct screenings efficiently, ultimately saving them hours of work. These improvements meant students at risk were identified faster, connected to the right resources sooner, and given access to critical mental health support without delay. A more intuitive experience allows counselors to focus on what truly matters: fostering a safe space where mental health is recognized, prioritized, and destigmatized.
“Great design starts with empathy—by walking in the counselor’s shoes, I built a platform that truly supports their needs.”
Maro: An Award-Winning Leader
Maro has been recognized as a leader in pediatric mental health innovation, winning the following awards:
“Maro’s mission is to eliminate the 11-year gap between first symptom and first intervention when it comes to youth mental health.”
Credits
Ashley Osorio | Lead UI Designer
Ava Lieu | UX Researcher & Designer
Sarah Lohier | Product Designer
Sejal Patel | Lead UX Researcher & Designer