Streamlining behavioral therapy tools into a unified experience

This healthcare organization's therapists were working across five disconnected tools every day, with no shared system tying them together. That fragmentation showed up everywhere:

• Experiences spread across five unconnected tools, with no shared mental model for how they fit together
• Repetitive manual work and inconsistent workflows, as therapists re-entered the same information across systems
• No existing UX research, so the business had never actually seen this pain from the therapist's side

The company had already decided they wanted one consolidated tool. What they didn't have was research to tell them what that tool needed to solve, or whether their legacy systems could even support it.

I was brought in as a consultant, working as Sr. Product Designer under our Lead Designer's direction. I owned planning and execution of the concept phase: research, workflow mapping, workshop with stakeholders, concept design, and usability testing, working alongside a Junior Designer, our Product Manager, and Engineers.

My approach was to keep the concept grounded in what was actually feasible, not just what was ideal. Rather than designing in isolation and handing off a finished concept, I worked directly with the development team throughout, checking what the legacy architecture could support before committing to a direction.

To understand the real workflow, I ran on-site interviews and contextual inquiry with behavioral therapists, then mapped what I learned into an as-is journey covering every phase of a patient visit, the people involved, and where the friction actually lived.

One finding stood out: therapists had quietly built their own workaround documents just to function across the five disconnected tools, something the business didn't know was happening. That signal shaped how we scoped the concept from here on.

After the as-is journey made the problems visible, I co-facilitated a workshop with therapists and clinical managers to react to it directly. Together we co-created the future-state journey and prioritized which parts of it mattered most for an MVP.

With the future-state journey prioritized, I designed a high-fidelity concept in Figma, focused on the core tasks therapists needed most: preparing for sessions, documenting notes, and managing referrals. I used the client's existing design system components to keep the concept consistent and easy for their team to build on later.

To validate the concept, I ran moderated remote usability testing with 5 therapists against the Figma prototype. Testing confirmed the core flows were intuitive and surfaced specific refinements before handoff, rather than after development had already started.

Over 10 weeks, our team ran 12 interviews and tested the concept with 5 therapists using a Figma prototype. Testing surfaced consistent, actionable signals that validated the direction:

• Strong enthusiasm for a consolidated, 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

These signals gave the team and stakeholders confidence to move forward, and turned into a clearer product direction that helped the Product Manager accelerate roadmap planning:

• Defined a scalable vision for a therapist-centered platform
• Uncovered critical workflow gaps before any development started
• Set up the next team with validated patterns, flows, and design-system-ready components

It replaced an untested assumption ("we need one consolidated tool") with a feasibility-checked direction the business could actually build against.

This project reinforced how much concept-driven design benefits from being rooted in field research, not assumptions. A few things I'm especially proud of:

• Designing with and alongside therapists through discovery and ideation, not just for them
• Leading on-site interviews and contextual inquiry to ground the work in reality, not guesswork
• Supporting a Junior Designer through their first full-cycle UX project
• Delivering tested, practical concepts that informed a long-term product vision, even without shipping code