Healthcare Start-up
Well-being GPS
Most behavior change plans fail. We redesigned from the patient’s perspective.
A mental health organization wanted to transform their clinical tools into a licensable service. What we discovered in discovery changed the entire direction of the product.
Role
Lead UX designer
Methods & artifacts
Workshop facilitation
Strategy
Design system
Prototypes
User testing
Mobile app
Discovery
Three parties. Three different definitions of success.
The organization’s goal was clear on the surface: transform their clinical program tools into a licensable service for other providers. What wasn't clear was whose needs the product was actually meant to serve.
Through immersion sessions and workshops, I surfaced a tension that would shape everything that followed. Business leadership was focused on operational efficiency — maximizing performance of patients, providers, and revenue. Therapists wanted tools that let them truly listen, understand patients' unique situations, and develop treatment plans their patients could actually stick to. And patients — whose voice was largely absent from the initial brief — turned out to be the linchpin.
Immersion workshops with business leadership and clinical teams surfaced divergent priorities — the starting point for reframing the product's direction.
The pivot
The real obstacle wasn't the tools. It was adherence.
The original brief assumed the problem was on the provider side — better tools for clinicians would produce better outcomes. Discovery told a different story. Patients' lack of adherence to behavior change plans was the primary obstacle to improved well-being. Old habits, a lack of accountability, inconvenience, and the inability to see incremental progress were causing people to abandon plans that might otherwise have worked.
Pivotal design decision
“Empower patients with guided and achievable behavior change tools to measurably improve health outcomes.”
Rather than building better practitioner tools, we shifted focus to direct patient engagement, giving patients a way to interact with the platform daily, track incremental progress, and stay accountable between sessions.
This reframe unlocked a new mission for the product — and a new commercial opportunity. A patient-facing platform could function as a fully self-guided experience as well as an integrated tool within a practice's existing workflow, opening the door to a direct-to-consumer offering alongside the original B2B licensing model.
Strategy and execution
An aggressive timeline required two tracks running at once
With an expanded team of healthcare technology and business experts on board, we couldn't afford a linear process. Technical and experience gaps needed to be resolved while design was still in progress.
The solution was a two-track approach: Track one prioritized simpler, lower-risk flows — onboarding, basic navigation — allowing us to establish a visual design framework and align it with the product narrative and brand early. Track two ran concurrently, tackling the more complex behavioral features and interaction challenges that needed more exploration time.
Early wireframes for onboarding and core navigation — the first track's deliverable.
Visual framework and design patterns established in parallel with wireframing.
Key design decisions
What testing taught us about behavior change
1
Break monthly assessments into weekly check-ins
Duplicating the provider-facilitated in-office assessment for self-guided use didn't work. Testers found it too long to fit into their lives. Breaking monthly assessments into shorter weekly check-ins made the commitment manageable without losing the data fidelity clinicians needed.
2
Replace Likert scales with a continuous slider
Testers consistently reported that fixed-point Likert scales didn't capture how they actually felt — they wanted to land between values. Moving to a continuous slider gave users a greater sense of accuracy and, unexpectedly, also reduced the time it took to complete assessments.
3
Show progress across multiple dimensions simultaneously
A single-metric progress view wasn't enough to sustain motivation. The Health Portrait — a multi-dimensional progress visualization — gave patients a richer view of their well-being, helping them identify which areas were improving and which needed attention.
The weekly check-in broken into a short, focused session — designed to fit into a patient's routine without requiring a scheduled appointment.
Replacing Likert scales with a continuous slider gave testers a sense of accuracy when they recorded how they felt and reduced assessment completion time.
The Health Portrait gave patients a 360-degree view of their well-being across multiple dimensions, surfacing patterns that a single-metric view would have obscured.
Outcomes
A proof of concept that opened new doors.
Functional hybrid app
A working mobile-friendly prototype covering the patient assessment flow and self-guided change plan framework.
Novel sentiment interface
The continuous slider replaced Likert scales — a small change with a measurable impact on both accuracy and completion time.
Design system delivered
A full pattern library and documentation gave the team a foundation to build from — not just a prototype to reference.
New commercial model identified
The pivot to patient-direct engagement opened a direct-to-consumer opportunity alongside the original B2B licensing model.
Reflection
The most valuable moment in this project wasn‘t a design decision, it was the willingness of the team to act on what discovery actually showed rather than what the original brief assumed. Shifting the product‘s center of gravity from clinician tools to patient engagement required everyone to let go of a preconception about where the problem lived. The dual-track execution was a direct response to that pivot happening mid-project: we needed a way to move fast without abandoning rigor. If I were approaching this again, I'd push to include patient voices in the immersion sessions from the start, rather than surfacing their needs indirectly through the clinical team.