Gottman Referral Network
Find a Gottman therapist near you
Dr. John Gottman and Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman have revolutionized the study of marriage. For nearly five decades they have conducted research on all facets of relationships, including parenting issues. At the Gottman Institute, they developed an approach that not only supports and repairs troubled relationships, but strengthens happy ones.
The Gottman Institute provides live workshops and take-home training materials for couples, while The Gottman Referral Network helps couples find an accredited therapist trained in Gottman methodology.
The challenge
The Gottman Referral Network needed an overhaul, the site was slow, the design was dated, and reconciling the monthly payments involved over a full day’s work every month. The website wasn’t reflective of the results couples could expect in engaging a Gottman trained therapist.
What we did
After our successful launch of the The Relationship Checkup the Gottman Institute turned to us to rebuild their referral network.
We had success using Ruby on Rails for Gottman previously, and so they were happy for us to use it again.
We assessed what would be required to port the app to a new platform. This involved looking at the migration of both the application data and migrating existing credit card data from their previous payment provider to Stripe. From there, we prototyped a modern, clean design and iterated on it after testing with key stakeholders and customers.
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Ruby on Rails
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PostgreSQL
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Stimulus
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Ansible
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Elasticsearch
To update the search engine, we used Elasticsearch so we could do complex queries while maintaining performance.
How it turned out
- < 100ms
- Average response time for pages on site
Our careful attention to search engine optimization paid off: the Gottman Referral Network listings show in top 3 results on relevant search term result pages.
The site response times and powerful filtering capabilities ensure that couples can quickly find and contact a therapist that best matches their needs. Meanwhile, using Stripe as the payment processor has greatly simplified the accounting work required every month.
Parents.com listed the Gottman Referral Network as the “Best Directory” in a 2023 roundup of recommended services.
