UX/UI design
Self-directed concept
iOS app
BetterHelp is a name most people recognize, and that is exactly why I chose to redesign it. Working with something familiar meant confronting its hardest, most real problems instead of inventing convenient ones.
This self-directed project reimagines the full arc of digital therapy, from finding a therapist to starting and staying, around three things the category tends to underserve: trust, emotional safety, and continuity of care.
Over 10% of the global population lives with anxiety or depression, yet access to support is still limited by cost, availability, and the complexity of getting started. Platforms like BetterHelp exist to close that gap, but access alone isn't care.
This self-directed project reimagines the full arc of digital therapy, from finding a therapist to starting and staying, around three things the category tends to underserve: trust, emotional safety, and continuity of care.
BetterHelp connects users to a global network of licensed therapists, but the experience around that connection is where it strains. Onboarding, matching, and ongoing care often feel fragmented, clinical, and hard to sustain. Four gaps stood out:
Trust is fragile. In 2023 the FTC penalized BetterHelp for sharing users' mental-health information with advertisers, yet the product does little to reassure people about privacy at the moments it matters most.
Crisis has no clear home. There is no obvious, always-available path to urgent help, a serious gap in a mental-health product.
Reflection is clunky. Journaling and sharing notes with a therapist are awkward, and it's unclear what stays private.
The experience is transactional. Care ends when the session does, and little connects one moment to the next.
The opportunity was to rethink digital therapy around clarity, trust, and safety, not just access.
The redesign turns BetterHelp from a set of disconnected features into a continuous arc of care: discover, book, meet, reflect, and return.
Along the way it designs for the moments the category usually skips: privacy the user controls, an always-reachable crisis pathway, identity-affirming matching, and reflection that carries between sessions. A calmer, less clinical brand ties it together.
Access to therapy has improved. Sustaining it hasn't. Even once someone begins, staying engaged is hard without structure, trust, and a sense of progress.
This project is grounded in established research rather than proprietary user studies. Three principles shaped it most:
The therapeutic alliance, the trust between client and therapist, is one of the strongest predictors of whether therapy works. Design that builds or erodes trust isn't cosmetic. It's clinical.
Safety is a design responsibility. People in crisis need immediate, unambiguous routes to help, following established safe-messaging guidance.
Consistency beats motivation. People maintain care through structure and visible progress, not willpower.
With over 10% of the global population affected by anxiety and depression, and access still uneven, the question wasn't only how to make therapy reachable. It was how to make it trustworthy and sustainable.
It makes trust visible. Journaling and notes are private by default, with a clear, per-entry choice about what a therapist can see, a direct answer to the platform's privacy history.
It designs for crisis. An always-reachable support path puts immediate lifelines first, before any in-app booking.
It connects care over time. Sessions, homework, journaling, and asynchronous chat feed into one another, so therapy continues between appointments instead of resetting each time.
I focused the redesign on the moments that quietly decide whether someone stays in care: the first matcha, the space before a session, and the stretch between appointments.
Small moments of friction quietly decide whether someone continues into care: an unclear form, a vague wait, an ambiguous privacy setting. The redesign reduces that friction with a few consistent principles:
Set expectations to calm anxiety. Response times ("usually replies within a day"), session timers that show time remaining rather than counting up, and honest matching states reduce the uncertainty that drives drop-off.
Separate reflecting from doing. Journaling (open, private) and Practice (structured exercises, worksheets, and therapist-assigned videos) live apart, so neither feels buried in the other.
Make privacy legible. Every shareable moment states plainly what's private and what a therapist can see.
The hardest part of digital therapy isn't starting. It's staying. Drop-off is most common after onboarding, particularly when people lose a sense of progress or direction. This mirrors cognitive load theory, where decision complexity and unclear structure erode sustained, goal-driven engagement. In therapy, that shows up as the uncertainty of "what do I do between sessions?"
It also reflects the goal-gradient effect: motivation grows as progress becomes visible and measurable.
The experience is restructured around three mechanisms:
Progress externalization. Journaling, mood check-ins, and session history make internal reflection visible over time.
Reduced cognitive load. Asynchronous chat is clearly separated from structured sessions, so each has a distinct purpose.
Continuity framing. Recurring sessions and a session-to-homework-to-reflection loop create predictable cycles that reinforce routine.
Together these turn therapy from isolated interactions into a continuous feedback system, sustaining engagement through structure and visibility, not motivation alone.
Starting therapy is the highest-friction moment in the journey. Surfacing real availability, affirming identity in matching, and letting people browse before committing lowers the barrier to that first, hardest step.
Designing for mental health means designing for its hardest moments. An always-reachable support path, with immediate lifelines ahead of any in-app booking, treats safety as a responsibility, not an afterthought.
Trust is built in the details. Making privacy legible and giving reflection a dedicated home turns therapy from a series of appointments into a continuous relationship, where each session builds on the last.
This project reimagines digital therapy as a cohesive journey, one that supports clarity, trust, and continuity rather than a series of disconnected tasks. It demonstrates design decisions specific to mental health: privacy the user controls, a safety-first crisis pathway, identity-affirming matching, and accessibility built in (captioned intro videos, live session captions).
A note on responsibility: features like crisis support are shown here as design explorations. In practice they would be built with clinical and safety experts and follow established suicide-prevention guidelines. Designing for these moments is exactly where restraint and collaboration matter most.
