Thryvia | What Works & What’s Tough
Finding common ground through collaborative reflection.
A guided behavioral health experience helping teens with bipolar disorder and their supporters identify strengths, understand challenges, and personalize ongoing support.
De-identified professional UX case study | Recreated from confidential behavioral health product work.
THE CHALLENGE
Teens living with bipolar disorder and their supporters may experience the same situations very differently. While teens understand their internal experiences, supporters often notice changes in behavior, routines, and daily functioning.
The opportunity was to create a supportive way to bring those perspectives together, turning personal reflection into shared understanding and meaningful input for personalized care.
THE CONSTRAINT
The activity needed to be emotionally safe, easy to complete during periods of reduced energy or concentration, and useful to both teens and supporters without requiring them to agree on everything.
THE DESIGN SHIFT
Replace disconnected conversations and assumptions with a guided exercise where each person identifies strengths and challenges before exploring their perspectives together.
THE GOAL
Help teens and supporters recognize what is working, identify priorities, and create a shared foundation for personalized activities and support.
My Role & Contributions
As Lead UX/UI Designer on the original professional project, I translated clinical insights and product requirements into a structured, approachable collaborative experience.
I developed the experience architecture, interaction flows, wireframes, and prototypes, collaborating with psychologists, product leadership, engineers, other designers, and people with lived experience to prepare the feature for development.
UNDERSTANDING THE USERS
Teens need opportunities to describe their experiences in their own words without feeling judged or defined by their symptoms. Supporters need ways to express what they observe and understand how best to help.
The experience needed to validate both perspectives, begin with strengths rather than problems, and make reflection manageable. Neither person’s answers should automatically override the other’s.
Design
Approach
I structured the activity around a simple progression: identify what works, explore what’s tough, and establish shared priorities.
The teen first identifies strengths, resources, and positive routines before selecting challenges that affect daily life. Their supporter then completes a corresponding reflection, bringing another perspective into the experience.
Both sets of responses are used to build a shared reference that can inform personalized tools, activities, and recommendations throughout the product.
What I Learned
Starting with strengths can make sensitive conversations feel more approachable. Thoughtful sequencing matters when designing experiences that ask people to reflect on difficult parts of their lives.
Designing for fluctuating energy, attention, and emotional capacity reinforced the value of short steps, clear choices, and low-friction interactions.
This work also highlighted how structured reflection can create value beyond a single activity when its outputs help inform the broader product experience.
A Note About This Project
Thryvia is a de-identified adaptation of professional UX work involving a confidential behavioral health product. The project challenge, design approach, and contributions reflect my work; branding and presentation materials have been recreated to protect confidential information. Recreated visuals are illustrative, not screenshots of a released Thryvia product.