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 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

People experiencing bipolar symptoms and their supporters often see different realities, making it hard to agree on what support is needed most.

People living with bipolar disorder may focus on internal experiences such as mood changes, motivation, or emotional intensity. Supporters, on the other hand, may notice external behaviors like sleep disruption, impulsive decisions, or withdrawal.

Without a shared understanding of these experiences, it can be difficult for digital tools, or even relationships, to provide effective support.

The challenge was to design an activity that could help both participants reflect on what's currently working and what's currently tough, align their perspectives, and produce meaningful information that personalizes the rest of the app.

Solution

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

The experience guides users through a short sequence of steps designed to be simple and supportive.

First, the individual with Bipolar selects what's working which reflect positive qualities and resources in their life. Next, they identify what's tough which are things that affect their well-being and prioritize which ones have 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 becomes 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 individual’s experience.
Turn reflection into actionable data
Capturing strengths and challenges as structured information allows the product to personalize recommendations across the app.

Impact

This feature turns personal reflection into structured data that enables more relevant, 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.
Simple interaction patterns help users complete reflective activities even during periods of low energy, motivation, or decreased capacity.
Including supporter perspectives can reveal insights that individuals may not identify on their own, creating opportunities for more effective collaboration.
Structured reflection can become a powerful foundation for personalization when it is thoughtfully integrated into the broader product experience.