What Works and What's Tough

Thryvia: Bipolar Support System for Teens

A collaborative exercise that helps people with bipolar disorder and their supporters identify strengths, prioritize challenges, and personalize care.

This case study is a portfolio-safe adaptation of a real mental health product protected by an NDA.

Overview

What Works and What's Tough is a feature helps individuals and their supporters quickly align on what’s helping, what’s hard, and where support should focus.

People living with bipolar disorder often experience cycles of mood changes that can affect sleep, motivation, decision-making, and daily functioning. Support from family members or trusted supporters can be extremely valuable, but many parent-teen dyads struggle to clearly communicate about what helps, what gets in the way, and where support should focus. I designed a guided in-app exercise that helps a person with bipolar disorder and their supporter identify personal strengths (what works), surface meaningful challenges (what's tough), and create a shared list that drives personalized support throughout the app. The resulting artifact becomes a foundation for tailoring future activities, recommendations, and therapeutic tools.

My Role

Lead UX/UI Designer

Synthesizing clinical research and psychological insights
Defining the experience architecture
Designing the full interaction flow
Creating wireframes and prototypes
Collaborating with clinicians, engineering, and leadership
Preparing the experience for development

Team

CEO / Product Lead
Clinical psychologists
Engineering team
Additional UX designers
Persons with lived experience

Tools

Figma
FigJam
Journey mapping
Interaction flow modeling
Collaborative design workshops

Problem

Research shows that people with bipolar disorder and their supporters often perceive different realities.

Individuals with bipolar may focus on internal experiences like mood shifts, motivation, or emotional intensity, while supporters notice external behaviors such as sleep disruption, impulsivity, or withdrawal.

Without a shared understanding, both relationships and digital tools struggle to provide effective support.

The challenge was to design an activity that helps both participants reflect on what’s working and what’s difficult, align perspectives, and generate meaningful inputs to personalize the rest of the app.

Solution

I co-designed and implemented a guided reflection flow that helps users identify what’s working, what’s tough, and merge perspectives into a shared list.

The experience walks users through a short, supportive sequence.

First, the individual with bipolar disorder selects what’s working, highlighting positive qualities and resources in their life. Next, they identify what’s tough, factors affecting their well-being, and prioritize those with the greatest impact.

After completing the exercise, a supporter is invited to complete the same activity. The system then reveals both perspectives and merges them into a shared list that serves as a reference point for future support.

Design Principles

Designing mental health tools requires balancing emotional safety, clarity, and meaningful personalization. Several principles guided the design of this experience:

Start with what works
Beginning with positive qualities creates a supportive tone and helps users engage with the exercise before reflecting on challenges.
Keep interactions lightweight
Short steps and simple selection interactions make the activity easier to complete during fluctuating mood or energy levels.
Support multiple perspectives
Allowing supporters to contribute their view provides a fuller picture of the dyad's experience.
Validate with users
User research confirmed that the flow felt acceptable, supportive, and not overly burdensome for both individuals and supporters.
Turn reflection into actionable data
Capturing what works and what's tough as structured information allows the product to personalize recommendations across the app.

Impact

This experience turns personal reflection into structured data, enabling more relevant and personalized mental health support.

This feature helps individuals and supporters align on what matters most while enabling more personalized mental health support. By transforming personal reflections into structured information, the exercise provides a foundation for tailoring activities, tools, and recommendations to each user’s situation.

If implemented in production, success would be evaluated through several indicators:

completion rate of the reflection activity
supporter participation in the exercise
alignment between user and supporter priorities
engagement with personalized recommendations
perceived usefulness of the activity

Together, these indicators would help determine whether the feature improves personalization, engagement, and collaborative support within the product.

What I Learned

Designing collaborative mental health experiences requires balancing emotional sensitivity, usability, and meaningful outcomes.

This project reinforced several lessons that continue to shape my design approach:

Leading with positives can increase participation and reduce resistance when discussing difficult topics, supported by both research and user feedback.
Simple interaction patterns help users complete reflective activities even during periods of low energy or reduced capacity, confirmed through user testing.
Including supporter perspectives can surface insights individuals may not identify on their own, consistent with broader research and user research findings.
Structured reflection becomes more powerful for personalization when integrated thoughtfully into the broader product experience, reinforced by both literature and observed user needs.