Betterhelp
I worked as a Product Designer at Betterhelp for 2.5 years and designed a variety of systems, products, and features. I've selected a few of my favorites for this portfolio. These aren't necessarily the highest-converting or even most successful projects that I worked on, just the ones I most enjoyed and felt connected to.
Design process overview
After receiving product specs from a PMs, I scheduled kick-off calls to discuss the problem-at-large. Primarily this would mean answering the questions: "What problem are we trying to solve?" and "How will we know if we've solved it?" For smaller projects, we iterate on initial wireframes and different conceptual sketches. For larger and complex projects, we diagram user flows in Figjam.
After the initial call, I went back-and-forth with the PM on slack or zoom over the next few days/weeks reviewing iterations and directions. We'd leave comments or notes with ideas for improvement, potential roadblocks, and questions for stakeholders.
After the design was approved by the PM and design reviewers, I'd create a meeting with the PM and engineer to go over the handoff files together and answer any questions the engineers have. Sometimes, something unexpected would arise during development and we'd quickly solve it over Slack or a call and update the design if needed.
Once the feature was done and uploaded to staging, I'd test, screenshot, and annotate anything that needed correction (alongside a reference to the design). I'd send this annotated file to the engineer or schedule a meeting to review together depending on complexity. Almost every new feature at Betterhelp was launched as an experiment and tested with user segments to ensure it met or exceeded the desired KPIs.
Live Session Waiting Room
The unfortunate side effect of busy clinical practices is that care providers aren't always on-time. I've probably spent collective 10+ hours of my life sitting in waiting rooms for doctors, dentists, or therapists. Betterhelp was no exception to this problem.
When approaching this problem, I looked to physical waiting rooms for inspiration. Doctors offices fill their waiting rooms with plants, aquariums, magazines, toys, and music to occupy adults and children alike. These are all great ways to reduce the perceived waiting time. An occupied mind is likely to feel like less time is passing, and ideally enter the therapy session without lingering frustration toward their therapist.
If the goal was the same, I wondered what would some of these solutions look like when applied digitally. A product manager and I started by discussing "passive" or non-interactive solutions. Some ideas included a virtual fishtank or koi pond, visuals that reacted to soft music, or prompts that encouraged clients to reflect before their session. Ultimately it became clear that a more interactive solution would be more engaging, and in turn reduce the perceived waiting time.
I designed and built two interactive prototypes for this problem. One of them, nicknamed "Gradient" was a simple ambient experience that imitated the effects of a lava lamp with beautiful sunset colors. Dragging your mouse around the screen would make vivid blobs of colors attract and repel which had a very passive, relaxing effect.
The other prototype, nicknamed "Playground", allowed the user to freely play with an array of 2d colorful shapes in a physics simulation. Users could build, stack, sort, toss, and spin the shapes freely.
I wanted to know how these prototypes affected people's perception of time, and if they would be satisfied with an experience like this before a therapy session. I devised a series of qualitative prompts and questions on the UserTesting platform and launched the test to select contributors. Below are some findings I compiled from the results of the test.
Both prototypes showed promise, but they served different needs. "Playground" made waiting feel shorter and was rated more enjoyable, while "Gradient" better prepared participants mentally for their sessions. The choice between them depends on the desired pre-session state: active engagement to pass time quickly, or calming focus to enter therapy in a reflective mindset.
Ultimately the product team decided to move forward with the Gradient concept as it would be much easier to build, and thus a lower-risk investment. Personally, Playground was always my favorite and I hope it eventually finds its way into the the hands of users somewhere...
Session Reflections
Betterhelp offers more than just therapy sessions. Alongside counseling, clients have access to tools like journaling, group sessions, worksheets, and learning resources meant to enrich the overall experience. But the data was clear: very few clients engaged with the journal, and those who did rarely came back to it. This was a missed opportunity as clients who journaled regularly were more likely to stick with therapy over time.
Journal prompts were often generic and disconnected from what clients had just discussed in their sessions. The journal itself was buried in a separate menu, out of sight for clients who usually signed in only for their scheduled appointments. And when sessions ended, the experience felt impersonal and clinical, lacking anything that encouraged quiet reflection.
Our solution was to integrate the journal more closely with therapy sessions, making it surface at the right time and with more meaningful prompts. We also added a visual "mosaic" that would slowly fill with color as the client reflected on their session. We wanted the post-session moment to feel personal, calm, and reflective. Something that naturally invited the client to pause and write.
After finishing a session reflection, clients could see their responses both in their therapy dashboard and in their journal. They could also choose to share reflections with their therapist, creating more opportunities for meaningful conversation in the next session.
For this experiment, we rolled the update out to 60,000 users. Our main KPI was repeat journal usage, with 60-day PPA as a secondary metric. The experiement won, increasing journal egagement and repeat usage by 12% in 60 days.
These results opened the door for us to iterate and improve with follow-up ideas:
- Offering a similar experience before a session starts, while clients wait for their therapist (see "Live Session Waiting Room" above).
- Equipping therapists with more details about the feature so they can encourage usage for their clients.
- Making the visual elements more dynamic, reacting to context like time of day or weather.
And after testing, we identified some edge cases and opportunities for polish:
- Letting clients choose which responses to share on a question-by-question basis.
- Auto-saving entries so they can be closed and resumed later.
- Sending notifications if a client quits the app immediately after a session ends.
Session reflections is still one of my favorite projects that made it into the product at Betterhelp. It was one of those things where I really had to advocate for the value of having something more whimsical and delightful in nature, especially given how difficult it would be to quantify. It broke a lot of rules and I'm very grateful for the trust and support I was given.
Matching Animation in Quiz
Betterhelp has over 30,000 active therapists. New clients sign up every day, each hoping to find the right fit. That matching process begins with a questionnaire, a set of prompts designed to help clients share who they are, what they need, and what kind of therapist they’re looking for. Behind the scenes, BetterHelp’s algorithm uses those answers to narrow the pool of potential matches.
The system works, but it doesn’t feel personal. From a client’s perspective, the survey can feel like sending answers into a void. We wanted to make the process more tangible; to give each response visible weight and make the narrowing-down something you could see happening in real-time. The hypothesis was that by making each response feel impactful and consequential, we could increase survey completion rates and conversion.
The prototype I designed visualized the therapist pool shrinking as each question was answered.
You can play with it here:
One interesting challenge was that we couldn't actually show real therapist faces in the visualization. Some questions ask about therapist race or gender preferences, and dynamically generating realistic faces to match those filters would have been a heavy engineering lift, not to mention a sensitive privacy issue. The visuals needed to convey the act of filtering without literally doing it.
To solve for this, we ended up slightly blurring the faces to make them un-identifiable and opted to disable the animation on questions that pertained to therapist race or gender preference.
Redesigned Session Page
When I was interviewing at Betterhelp, I was asked to design and present some potential improvements for the product. After spending some time with the product, I imagined a more integrated experience for the session page (the "home" page for clients in the app). As most of the screen was consumed by a massive chat window, I felt more actions should be integrated directly into the chat itself. Sessions could be scheduled, worksheets could be viewed and completed, and contextual actions could be taken on messages, alerts, and reminders.
Integrating these flows into the chat made actions feel more conversational, as if they were part of an ongoing dialogue with the therapist, rather than tasks facilitated by a separate third-party platform.
Over my tenure at the company, I found many small ways to drive the product towards this directive. When redesigning the sessions page for an upcoming rebrand, I made attachments and videos feel directly embedded in messages. Alerts and reminders were made to feel more integrated with messages as well.
There was an idea floating around for a more unified “dashboard” page being the home, ultimately making the “chat” function a much smaller piece of the product. This was advantageous for a number of reasons, but particularly because making the chat such a large function of the product encouraged clients to message their therapist during off-hours.
