Therapy companion
About the project
Healios aimed to become a holistic mental health provider, but its business model still centered on autism assessments. During a pilot of post-assessment therapy with NHS trusts, a new challenge emerged: clients needed more support between sessions than contracts allowed. With renegotiation off the table, we explored how to provide that support through a digital therapy companion app, focused on emotional regulation and crisis support—without adding to clinician workload.
My role in it
I led the end-to-end discovery and design of a new digital therapy support app—from early research and workshops to prototyping and user testing. This included reviewing clinical literature, collaborating closely with clinical stakeholders, running value proposition sessions, mapping user journeys, and designing with a focus on cognitive accessibility for neurodiverse users.
As this was Healios’s first mobile app, I also co-implemented missing components and extended the functionality of existing ones in our design system to support mobile use.
Why it mattered
While therapy was being trialed, clinicians were overwhelmed with client support requests between sessions—especially during emotional crises. The most common recommendation was to use digital tools, but existing apps were generic, outdated, or mismatched with our therapy model. We needed something that would truly support clients in the gaps between sessions, without adding to clinician workload or changing contractual limitations.
How we did it
Research problem space
I started by interviewing clients and clinicians, and also shadowed clinicians during their workdays to observe outreach in real life and understand:
•. what clients struggle with between sessions
• what triggers them to reach out for help
• what they already do to cope without a therapist
• what kinds of support clinicians get asked for, and whether any of that could be handled by a tool
Key insights:
• most clients reach out because they’re emotionally overwhelmed, not looking for new information
• even when they know helpful strategies, they often forget them in the moment or don’t know how to use them
• generic tools like Headspace didn’t feel relevant and sometimes even made things worse due to overstimulation
Then I developed user personas and journey maps based on these insights. The final step in the research phase was to define the problem statement:
"Clients often face emotional distress between therapy sessions, but they’re unable to use strategies without a therapist guiding them through. Without better in-the-moment support, clinicians remain overburdened by outreach."
That led to defining the value proposition through workshops:
"A therapy companion app that helps neurodivergent clients manage distress between sessions by guiding them through familiar DBT techniques in a clear, structured way that feels like a natural extension of their therapy."
Define success
We defined success across three layers:
• User outcomes – Do clients using the app report higher confidence in managing distress compared to a control group
• Product usage – Do at least ≥20% of clients use the app at least once a week, even after therapy ends?
• Business impact – Has it reduced between-session outreach by at least 30% compared to control?
Ideate
From there, I worked with clinicians to unpack Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (that was used in post-assessment therapy) and turn it into step-by-step guidance designed to ask the same kind of probing questions a clinician would—and adjust along the way.
I shaped the experience into two core flows:
• Emotional regulation – structured skill-building and emotional understanding
• SOS support – immediate support during crisis moments
Prototypes were tested with users, and the UI was designed to feel supportive, calming, and accessible—especially for neurodivergent users.
Solution
The core of the final solution was two resilience paths:
• One to help users recognize and work through emotions, building emotional stability over time.
• And one SOS flow for moments of overwhelm.
Emotional regulation path
First, we needed surface the underlying emotion—just like a clinician would in-session. Knowing that emotion allowed us to slightly tailor the flow to their emotional state.
Users had to choose from a curated list of emotion words, which we used to identify a core emotion. If they weren’t sure or didn’t agree, they could rotate a dial to explore broader categories like sadness, anger, or fear.
Once the emotion was identified, the user entered a tailored flow. They were guided through a series of clinician-style prompts—typing or recording answers.Sometimes they had to make a quick judgment themselves, like whether their emotion matched the facts. Based on what they shared, the app adapted and redirected them—just like a clinician would in-session.
Sometimes users had to make decisions—and those decisions weren’t always easy. In those moments, we always offered extra guidance and examples to help them decide with more confidence. And when users don’t have the capacity for questions or therapy work like this—that’s where the second flow came in.
SOS path
This flow focused on distress—they just need to stop, calm down, or avoid making things worse.
The SOS path starts with a stress rating: it helps us measure if it’s working, helps users notice the shift—and includes a gentle message that it’s time to stop.
Then it moves into practical strategies to shift body chemistry—things like quick exercise, muscle relaxation, or even using ice to calm the nervous system. If that feels overwhelming, users can tap “Choose for me” and the app picks a suggestion based on their stress rating.
And at the end, users could compare their stress levels. Depending on whether it improved or not, they’d see a different final screen—either reinforcing their progress or gently offering another path.
What it achieved
4 months after release, we recorded that:
• 22% of users felt more in control managing distress on their own compared to the control group
• 30% used the app weekly during therapy and 20% still used it 4 weeks after therapy ended
• clinician outreach dropped by 20%—saving around 15 minutes per clinician per week.
Even though it didn't hit the benchmark we expected, it was still a meaningful step forward.
Beyond reducing pressure on the clinical team and empowering clients, this project laid the groundwork for a scalable product that could truly support people between sessions—and bring Healios closer to its long-term vision of holistic, ongoing care.
