Case Study: Custom Therapist Matcher Tool
Problem
A mental health clinic came to my web designer partner with a challenge many multi-practitioner clinics face. Their team of therapists each specialize in different concerns, age groups, and approaches, but visitors to their website had no way to find the right fit without scrolling through every practitioner’s bio and guessing.
That guesswork was creating real friction. Visitors landed on the site already carrying whatever brought them there, whether that was anxiety, grief, or the search for support for a child. Instead of a clear next step, they were met with a full team page and no guidance. For the clinic, that friction showed up as an ongoing stream of phone calls asking the same question: who should I book with?
My web design partner, who led the design and client relationship for this clinic, brought me onboard to solve the technical side of this problem.
Strategy
We built a custom “Find a Therapist” quiz that guides visitors through a short, multi-step form rather than a long intake questionnaire. It asks what kind of support they need, counselling or assessment, who it’s for, the specific concern, accommodations, and province, with the form branching intelligently so no one is asked a question that doesn’t apply to them.
Matching Logic
Behind the scenes, I built custom matching logic that compares a visitor’s answers against tags on each therapist’s profile. Rather than a simple keyword match, the system checks that a therapist qualifies across every relevant category at once, concern, age group, province, and accommodation, which prevents mismatches like showing a child therapist to someone seeking adult trauma counselling.
I also built in a fallback so no visitor ever hits an empty results page, the ability to feature a specific therapist as “Best Match” for a given specialty, and shuffle logic so equally strong matches don’t always appear in the same order.
Custom Styles for Consistent Branding
Since the quiz and results page live on WordPress while the site itself is built in Showit, I custom-styled both to match the clinic’s existing colours, spacing, and card layout, including a two-column “Best Match” card, so the experience feels like one continuous page rather than a hand-off between two systems.
Results
Visitors now land on a results page tailored to exactly what they searched for, complete with a plain-language summary of why each therapist was matched to them. The featured “Best Match” card gives them a clear, confident next step instead of an overwhelming list.
For the clinic, that clarity has translated into fewer inquiry calls asking who to book with, since visitors can now find and understand their own best fit directly on the site. The system runs automatically with no daily manual work, and updating it for a new therapist or a new specialty is a quick tagging task rather than a rebuild.
Collaboration For the WIN!
This project was also a genuine collaboration win. My web design partner led the client relationship and design vision, and I owned the technical build, the matching logic, and the custom development that made it all work. It is exactly the kind of project I love: two skill sets coming together to solve something neither of us would tackle quite the same way alone.