Streamlining behavioral therapy tools into a unified experience

A leading U.S. healthcare network delivering primary and behavioral care to geriatric patients. Therapists were using up to five disconnected tools to manage patient care, creating friction, inefficiencies, and unnecessary complex tool load.

The existing legacy platform lacked support for behavioral health use cases, so the client saw this initiative as an opportunity to modernize their tools and better align them with the specific needs of behavioral health providers.

More broadly, the goal was to reduce operational complexity and scale behavioral health services more effectively. By consolidating fragmented tools, the client aimed to lower legacy system maintenance, reduce training costs, and accelerate onboarding for new therapists.

Fragmented product ecosystem

• Experiences spread across multiple unconnected tools
• No shared mental model for therapists

Operational friction

• Workflow inconsistencies
• Repetitive manual tasks across tools

Lack of user insight

• No existing UX research
• Limited visibility into their real therapist context

I led the end-to-end UX effort on the concept phase, including:

• Conducting on-site interviews and contextual inquiry with behavioral therapists
• Facilitating a collaborative workshop with therapists and clinical managers
• Mapping workflows and designing early-stage, high-fidelity concepts
• Leading usability testing and iteration cycles
• Collaborating daily with the Lead Designer, Junior Designer, Product Manager, and Engineers
• Aligning with stakeholders to ensure research-backed design decisions

To ground our work in the real therapist experience, I led and participated in:

• In-site user interviews at clinical sites to observe workflows and identify unmet needs
• A collaborative workshop with the design team to map the "as-is" user journey, including:
  • Phases of the patient visit
  • Key steps and handoffs
  • People involved (therapists, assistants, schedulers)
  • Tools used and major pain points

This journey map helped us synthesize our findings and communicate the existing complexity to stakeholders.

Next, I co-facilitated a design workshop with clinical managers and key stakeholders, where we:

• Reviewed the "as-is" journey to align on challenges
• Co-created the future-state user journey, defining an ideal therapist workflow
• Prioritized core features for the new tool and discussed MVP considerations

These sessions helped us shape our design hypotheses and ensured our concepts were grounded in real context, not assumptions.

Following the design workshop, our team (including therapists) began ideating what the new therapist workflow could look like. We mapped out the key steps and refined the structure through multiple collaborative sessions.

Once we had alignment on the flow, I worked with the design team to identify the most critical screens and user interactions to prototype.

Using our research insights, I designed a high-fidelity concept prototype in Figma, focusing on the core tasks therapists needed to perform:

• Preparing for patient sessions and understanding "how my day looks"
• Documenting therapy notes during or after a session
• Managing new referrals and follow-up patients, with an emphasis on prioritizing the most critical cases
• Tracking and completing follow-up actions, such as scheduling, documentation, and care coordination

The prototype used existing components from the client's design system to ensure consistency and scalability.

To validate the concept, I led moderated remote usability testing with a diverse group of therapists.

Our concept testing surfaced consistent, actionable insights that helped validate and strengthen the direction of the new therapist tool. Key takeaways from testing:

• Strong enthusiasm for a consolidated and structured tool
• Therapists wanted clear visual indicators of patient status
• High value placed on pre-filled fields and reusable patient data
• A centralized view of patient information, status, history, and notes was essential
• Familiar interaction patterns, paired with thoughtful improvements, made the tool feel intuitive and useful

These insights helped us refine the concept and gave the team and stakeholders clarity and confidence moving forward.

The validated concept also created a clearer, more tangible product vision for therapists, which helped the Product Manager accelerate planning and roadmap development. It:

• Defined a clear, scalable vision for a therapist-centered platform
• Enabled research-backed design decisions that aligned stakeholders
• Uncovered critical workflow gaps before committing to development
• Set up future teams with validated patterns, flows, and design system-ready components

This project was a powerful example of concept-driven design rooted in field research. I'm especially proud of:

• Designing with and alongside therapists through discovery and ideation
• Leading on-site interviews and contextual inquiry to ground our work in reality
• Supporting a Junior Designer through their first full-cycle UX project
• Delivering tested, practical concepts that informed a long-term product vision