Therapy companion
Overview
As I mentioned in streamlining autism assessments, the company's vision was clear—become a holistic mental health provider offering support beyond diagnosis. A year later, we were trialing post-assessment therapy with a few NHS trusts.
But a new problem surfaced: clients needed more support between sessions than expected. NHS contracts only covered a fixed number of sessions, leaving clients without help during emotional crises.
Clinicians recommended digital tools, but our therapy approach was based on recent research, and most tools out there were generic or outdated. They just weren’t cutting it.
The challenge: How do we provide better support between sessions without changing NHS contracts?
Problem discovery
I interviewed dozens of clinicians to get a clear picture of what was actually happening. I asked them about the most common reasons clients were reaching out for support between sessions. To back that up, I sent out a survey to the entire team so I’d have both qualitative and quantitative data to inform my design decisions.
The interviews made one thing crystal clear: clients were struggling the most during moments of emotional crisis when they didn’t have immediate support.
Solution discovery
Building a new app offering was a big step toward our vision of becoming a holistic mental health provider. I needed the MVP to solve immediate problems and be scalable for future growth.
I kicked off research to really understand the challenges around emotional dysregulation and figure out where the gaps were. I dug into clinical literature, interviewed five clients to get firsthand insights, and did a competitor analysis to see what was already out there. Then, I pulled everything together into user personas and user journeys to make sure we were designing something that actually addressed real needs.
I ran value proposition workshops to align the team on the app’s purpose. I then created user flows for emotional understanding, emotional regulation, and SOS support—addressing both skill-building and crisis intervention.
Next, I ran value proposition exercises to make sure everyone was on the same page about what this app was actually supposed to achieve. From there, I led the development of user flows for the key areas: emotional understanding, emotional regulation, and SOS support. The goal was to cover both structured skill-building and immediate help during moments of crisis.
Prototypes were tested them with potential users, gathering feedback and making improvements along the way. The final step was designing a UI that felt genuinely supportive, with a special focus on cognitive accessibility for neurodiverse users (great talk about it here).
Impact
The MLP (Minimum Lovable 🩷 Product) consisted of two parts:
Emotional Regulation (structured skill-building),
SOS Mode (immediate crisis support).
Four months post-release, requests for in-session support per clinician dropped by 28.5% (from 14 to 10). This project not only addressed a gap in digital mental health support but also laid the foundation for a product that could significantly improve the way DBT clients engage with therapy outside of sessions.
